Pariscope: Ile St Germain
 

I sought out the Ile St Germain because i wanted to see Jean DuBuffet's famous outdoor sculpture La Tour aux Figurines, which i had seen pictures of but never tracked down.
This immense sculpture is a veritable playground accoutrement as kids and adults too love to clamber up and on it.
The island is just across the bridge from the Issy-Plaine RER C station and about a mile downstream from the Tour Eiffel.
I found the park to be very animated even on the sunny December day i visited - it serves as a playground for many ethnic Arab residents and their kids - thus having the flare of a mid-eastern park.
What do you have to say Stella?

Continuing downstream from the Parc Departmental de i'Ile St-Germain to the section of the island on the other side of the main road that crosses the Seine and bisects the island yielded something to me of great surprise:
I've been trekking through Paris for decades and i thought i'd seen most everything unusual but i hadn't seen this area near the far tip of the island downstream - a parade of cute cottage-like gingerbread-like small houses, many of which front the south branch of the Seine. This is really a very unusual area - does anyone know much about this area and these garden type houses?
I was actually walking on a path on the other side of the Seine so only saw these diminuitive dwellings from across the river but they looked so cute!

About your posting? Nothing; I actually quite enjoyed it.

best

Stellarossa

The island used to be gardens : the monks of the Saint Germain Abbaye had their gardens and fields there until the 19 th century.
You still have 'jardins ouvriers' there (small parcels rented to factory workers to allow those city dwellers to have gardens)

norween: merci pour l'info! That you say these were gardens meant for workers leads well into the next part of my walk that day, continuing downstream on the footpaths that hug the Seine for the most part on its left bank here. The Ile Seguin, another island in the Seine lies just downstream from the Ile St Germain and this island is no paradise as it's part of the mammoth old Renault auto plant - the plant is abandoned and two years ago when i did this walk looked like it was due to be demolished. Yet still at that time the immense hulking, rusting iron plant was impressionable in its own way. I wonder what this prime real estate, with no doubt lots of toxic stuff to clean up, will eventually become?

The Ile Seguin should have a fate very similar to the Ile Saint Germain : part residential area, part public parc (with more sport equipments than on the Ile Saint Germain).
Former projects : hospital, modern art museum have been abandonned - and the office buildings should be kept to the 'Trapeze", the former Renault factory's part "ashore" in Boulogne.