Place des Ternes

Place des Ternes stands out for the thicket of flower stalls clustered at its center, their colors usually muted by the constant exhaust of the ring road traffic. It marks the site of an old toll gate where tax collectors once demanded payment from farmers bringing produce into Paris. In eighteen forty-eight, a local woman named Rose-Aimée-Julie Billard died here, leaving a fortune to the city on the condition it be used for the poor, a gesture that helped define the neighborhood’s modest beginnings.