Champs-Élysées from Top

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This is a picture of the avenue des Champs-Élysées during the day, in the afternoon, looking down towards the Louvre Museum. It was taken with a telephoto lens, which tends to scrunch things together, making the buildings in the distance look closer than they really are.

The Ferris wheel in the distance is the Roue de Paris, a temporary attraction intended to mark the start of the new millennium. Just in front of it is the place de la Concorde and the Obelisk, a pillar from Luxor that was a gift from the Viceroy of Egypt to king Louis-Philippe and is the oldest object in Paris (about 5000 years old). Behind the wheel are the Tuileries Gardens, and beyond those is the Louvre (all of the buildings in the background are part of the Louvre).

On the sides of the avenue in the foreground are very wide sidewalks and many buildings, shops, offices, and theaters, but you cannot see them here because of the large trees on either side of the street. Further down the avenue, the buildings give way to parkland, but that isn’t readily visible from this vantage point either (the division between the two is roughly where you see the street dipping lowest in this photo). The total distance from the camera to the courtyard of the Louvre is about 2.8 kilometres. The avenue itself is 1.6 km long (one mile—the avenue was laid out in the eighteenth century, before the metric system was invented).

Photographed on June 3, 2001.