Bois de Vincennes
The Bois de Vincennes (French pronunciation: [bwɑ d(ə) vɛ̃sɛn]), located on the eastern edge of Paris, France, is the largest public park in the city.
[3] It occupies ten percent of the total area of Paris, and is almost as large as the first six arrondissements in the center of the city combined.
[5] A hunting party in the forest is shown as the December scene in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1412–1416), with the towers of the chateau visible in the background.
The new palace featured a pavilion for the King and another for the Queen, separated by a portico and by a wall connected by arcades to the medieval section of the chateau.
The palace was popular with the King for a time, but once Louis XIV established his residence at Versailles, the château of Vincennes was rarely used.
In 1854 the Emperor Louis Napoleon, and his new Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, decided to transform the Bois de Vincennes into a public park.
To build the parks, in 1855 Haussmann created a new Service of Promenades and Plantations, led by an engineer, Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, who was already at work on the Bois de Boulogne.
Alphand was a master organizer, the builder of the most famous Paris parks of the 19th century; besides the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes, he built the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, the boulevard of the Paris Observatory, Parc Monceau and the Parc des Buttes Chaumont.
Alphand carefully composed his picturesque landscapes out of lawns, groves of trees, flower beds, streams and lakes, visited by taking winding paths.
Around the base were firing ranges, a factory for making ammunition, and several forts and redoubts, which occupied large tracts of land.
Even after the park was created, the Army continued to build; A new military shooting range was opened in 1860, and a school of pyrotechnics was built in 1864.
Trees, lawns and flower beds were planted by Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, the chief horticulturist of the city, who had landscaped the Bois de Boulogne.
On the same island was a Swiss chalet (taken from the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867), a cafe, a bandstand, and buildings for vendors and game concessions.
According to the legend (not documented), she is said to have blown a kiss at the firing squad, and to have said, "What a strange custom you French have, to shoot people at dawn.
In front of the palace was a large gilded bronze statue by Leon Drivier entitled France bringing peace and prosperity to the colonies.
The Grand Signal was a centerpiece of the exposition, a tower forty-five meters high, which spouted water from the top and from jets at nineteen different levels.
At the end of World War II in 1945, the French army began to move out of the Bois de Vincennes.
[1][14] As explained by French senator Christian Cambon: This exploitation ... comes from a recent triangular trade that spans from West Africa to Europe, through Maghreb.
[15]Most prostitutes await customers along the Route de la Pyramide[16] out on the sidewalk or in nearby vans on the curbside parking and signal their presence by illuminating their windshields.
