In a time before paved streets and sewers, the galleries' billiards, bistros and public baths served as a grown-up playground for the emerging middle class.

It was listed as a French historical landmark on 9 June 1965 and was restored in 1997 to its former 19th-century, neoclassical glory, complete with its elegant shops specializing in antiques, objets d'art, art books and fashion accessories.

The print-seller Gabriel Aubert, editor of Le Charivari and of La Caricature, also settled there and introduced the gallery to the most famous caricaturists of the time.

The passage is arranged to give an illusion of depth, the diagonal grid of black and white tiles, the low height of the ceiling decorated with paintings of landscapes where it is not glass, for shops on the alignment of a strict horizontal plane.

The façade of the gallery on the Rue du Bouloi is decorated with two statues in niches representing Hermes with his winged helmet and a Caduceus hand, god of merchants, and Hercules dressed in the skin of Nemean lion.