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Town hall of Paris (Hôtel de Ville) Foto 2/4 |
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City hall of Paris, Town hall of Paris (Hôtel de Ville), París, Isla de Francia (Nickname: Christophe) |
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The Hôtel de Ville (French for 'City Hall') in Paris, France, is the building housing the City of Paris's administration. Standing on the place de l'Hôtel de Ville (formerly the place de Grève) in the city's IVe arrondissement, it has been the location of the municipality of Paris since 1357. It serves multiple functions, housing the local administration, the Mayor of Paris (since 1977), and also being a venue for large receptions.
The Hôtel de Ville was for many years the fief of Jacques Chirac, France's president from 1995 until May 2007, and was the site of a scandal centering on both illegal jobs given to Chirac's party members and an extravagant entertainment budget.
The statue on the garden wall on the south side is of Étienne Marcel, the most famous holder of the post of prévôt des marchands (provost of merchants) which predated the office of mayor. Marcel came to a sticky end, lynched in 1358 by an angry mob after trying to assert the city's powers a little too energetically. The current mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, a socialist and the city's first openly gay leader, shares some of Marcel's ambition and almost shared his fate. He was stabbed in the building in 2002 during the first all-night, city-wide Sleepless Night (Nuit Blanche) festival when the long inaccessible building's doors were thrown open to the public. But Delanoë recovered and has not lost his zeal for access, later converting the mayor' sumptuous private apartments into a crèche (day nursery) for the children of municipal workers.
Admirers of the Hôtel de Ville's architecture may want to know that Ballu also built the Church of La Trinité in the IXe arrondissement and the belfry of the town hall of the Ier arrondissement, opposite the Louvre's east facade. He also restored the Saint-Jacques Tower, a Gothic church tower in a square 150 metres to the west of the Hôtel de Ville.
Subway station : hotel de ville
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