Place de Lévis

Rue de Lévis cuts through the seventeenth arrondissement with an intense, narrow energy defined by its market stalls. This street serves as the spine of a neighborhood that clings to its village character despite the sprawl of Paris. In eighteen sixty, the city annexed this area, but the merchants on this street refused to fold into the grand, uniform boulevards rising nearby. They held onto their cramped storefronts and persistent noise, keeping the market alive long after urban planners tried to modernize the district.