La Banane, a Google republic

In an almost perfectly square kilometre between Belleville and the Père Lachaise cemetery, a rather strange anomaly is written large on Google Maps - La Banane. What does this name actually represent, and what is the reality of this little visited part of the city?

On Invisible Paris, we've been here before. On July 4th 1905 - at the height of the public fascination with the Apaches sub-culture - a policeman on his first patrol was shot dead in this district. The incident was made more infamous with the publication of a book shortly afterwards, but at no moment was the name 'Banane' ever used.

Join me for an Obscura Day event on May 6

As part of the worldwide Obscura Day events on Saturday May 6 I will be hosting a tour of the ghostly Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale in the Bois de Vincennes. 

Challenge 11: the WW1 memorial that never was

Tracking down a war memorial last seen in the Père Lachaise cemetery nearly 100 years ago seemed like a tough task, particularly when the challenge came from a Paris graveyard art expert who did not recall ever having seen such a thing before. But despite the photographic evidence to the contrary, what if the memorial had simply never actually existed? 

The allée Guy Debord: real!

Nearly a year ago I published a post on this blog about a mysterious address on the edge of Paris. Although the allée Guy Debord was mentioned on maps, there seemed to be no evidence of it in the location itself. So did it really exist? The question was all the more interesting given the identity of the person concerned and the post-modern landscape in which the street was supposedly located. 

The lost world at the heart of Paris

Although it is difficult to plot the centre of a city coiled into 20 different arrondissements, geographically the spot wouldn’t be too far away from the Place du Chatêlet. Despite this centrality, the square and its surrounding streets wear an air of melancholic emptiness, as if imprisoned by their stifling past.