Pařížská: The Boulevard Built on a Ghetto

Why is it significant?

Walk slowly down the avenue and look above the designer shop windows: turrets, gables, mosaics, balconies held up by stone figures, every apartment building trying to outdo its neighbour. Pařížská, Paris Avenue, is the most elegant street in Prague... and one of its most uncomfortable.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk slowly down the avenue and look above the designer shop windows: turrets, gables, mosaics, balconies held up by stone figures, every apartment building trying to outdo its neighbour. Pařížská, Paris Avenue, is the most elegant street in Prague... and one of its most uncomfortable.

Until the 1890s, this area was Josefov, the old Jewish Town, a dense maze of lanes, courtyards and crooked houses. After Jews gained full civic equality in the mid nineteenth century, many families moved out, and the poorest of Prague crowded into the ghetto. The city declared it a health hazard, and from the 1890s, under a slum clearance law, it was largely torn down. The Czech word for that clearance is asanace, which literally means sanitation.

Not everything went. The Old-New Synagogue, a handful of other synagogues, the Jewish Town Hall and the Old Jewish Cemetery were spared, and you can glimpse some of them from the side streets. But hundreds of buildings disappeared, and in their place came a grid of wide streets and five-storey apartment blocks for the prosperous middle class.

The architects of these blocks borrowed from everywhere: French boulevards, Viennese ornament, neo-Gothic towers and the new Art Nouveau. The avenue was first called Mikulášská, after the church of St Nicholas at its southern end, and took the name of Paris later, in the years when Czechoslovakia looked to France as its great ally. At its northern end, Čech Bridge, finished in 1908, carries lamp posts and bronze figures that belong to the same Art Nouveau moment.

So enjoy the beauty, but read it twice. Every gilded balcony here stands where somebody's crooked house once stood, and the ghetto that inspired Kafka's darker imagination and the legend of the Golem survives only in a few precious buildings. From the middle of Pařížská, turn left into Široká and keep walking west until you reach the river and a broad square with a grand concert hall.