Passage Jouffroy and Passage Verdeau: The Last Arcades
Why is it significant?
Cross the boulevard and step into the Passage Jouffroy. Look up: no stone vault, no painted ceiling, just a light skeleton of iron holding up the glass. Around you, toy shops, old walking sticks, dolls' houses, and at the entrance the doors of a wax museum.
Key Facts
| Place | Passage Jouffroy and Passage Verdeau: The Last Arcades |
|---|---|
| Address | 10 Boulevard Montmartre, 75009 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.87290, 2.34230 |
| Part of Walk | Glass Roofs and Royal Secrets: From the Louvre to the Covered Passages of Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Cross the boulevard and step into the Passage Jouffroy. Look up: no stone vault, no painted ceiling, just a light skeleton of iron holding up the glass. Around you, toy shops, old walking sticks, dolls' houses, and at the entrance the doors of a wax museum.
Passage Jouffroy opened in the 1840s and it was the first in Paris built almost entirely of iron and glass, materials that would soon give the city its railway stations, its markets and, eventually, its tower. It was also, the story goes, the first passage with heating under the floor. Shoppers could stroll through a Paris winter without ever feeling the cold.
The wax museum is the Musée Grévin, opened in 1882 by a newspaper editor, Arthur Meyer, and the caricaturist Alfred Grévin. The idea was simple and brilliant: give readers the faces they only knew from the newspaper, in three dimensions. Politicians, criminals, actors, kings. It is still here, and the famous faces change with every generation. Inside, past the waxworks, hides a little theatre and a hall of mirrors with flickering lights, a show from the Paris World's Fair of 1900.
Keep walking, and notice how the passage turns and drops down a few steps. The builders had to follow the crooked plot of land they could buy, so the gallery bends like a street. On the other side of the Rue de la Grange-Batelière, the Passage Verdeau carries on, quieter, darker, full of old cameras, comic books and postcards from the last century.
These arcades were already a dying breed when they were built. A few years later, Baron Haussmann began cutting wide, paved, gas-lit boulevards through Paris, and nobody needed a glass tunnel to stay out of the mud any more. The passages survive because they were forgotten... and that is the secret of this whole walk, from the moat under the Louvre to this last glass roof. The Grands Boulevards are just behind you. Paris is yours.