Square Marcel Pagnol

The Square Marcel Pagnol sits on land that once served a much grittier purpose as a public refuse dump. During the massive urban redesign of Paris in the nineteenth century, the engineer Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand reclaimed this site, transforming the former waste ground into one of the city's signature green spaces. Originally known as Square Laborde, the area was later renamed to honor the celebrated playwright and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, a man who became the first filmmaker ever elected to the Académie Française. Today, the park is a quiet witness to the city's changing layers of history, thriving even with limited soil depth due to the heavy concrete structure of an underground parking garage built beneath it in the late nineteen sixties.