Prunier

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This is the rue Cler, a small street in Paris made unjustifiably famous by travel author Rick Steves.

The street runs for a few blocks and is mostly pedestrian, and contains a lot of small businesses that cater to residents of the neighborhood: bakeries, groceries, small restaurants, a vacuum-cleaner store, a post office, and the like. There are hundreds of streets like this in Paris.

This photo was taken very early in the morning. In the foreground you can see someone riding one of those ubiquitous Vélib' rental bicycles, with its bright headlight. Off in the background you can see a city sanitation worker, dressed in the bright green uniform that all such workers wear; they work very early in the morning and are gone by around 7 AM or so. Further in the background you can see delivery trucks delivering food to restaurants and stores on the street.

This street, however, was spotted by Rick Steves at some point a few years ago, and apparently he had never seen anything like it before (and had not noticed the many other streets in Paris that are similar), and so he waxed eloquent on the wonders of this street in his travel guide for Paris, and made it famous.

Today, the street is frequented by just as many American tourists as locals, many of them literally holding Rick's little green guide book in hand (I've seen them carrying it and reading aloud from it on the street, rather as one might read aloud from the Bible). This unwarranted tourism has changed the street somewhat, making it pricier, more touristy, and less adapted to local commerce.

Rick makes it sound like the experience of a lifetime. It's not. There are plenty of streets like this in Paris; it's typical of the city. Indeed, in cities that are densely populated and have a lot of people walking from place to place, this type of street isn't that exceptional, although such streets in Paris obviously have a specific Parisian flavor about them. So the rue Cler might be charming, but it's hardly unique within Paris, no matter what the little green book says.

The unfortunate thing is that this street is now considerably less authentic than it once was, because there are so many tourists walking through it today. Fortunately, there are other streets in Paris that Rick hasn't discovered, and they remain as they always were, and as the rue Cler once was.

Photographed on August 8, 2008.