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Travel & Experiences

News, Tips & Bargains : A Face Lift for Champs-Elysees

By SCOTT KRAFT

PARIS — The Champs-Elysees was once the most celebrated avenue in Paris, the artery where victorious armies marched and high society shopped and dined. In recent years, though, the avenue changed, collecting fast-food restaurants, movie theaters, car showrooms and petty criminals.

Now the city has given a 2 1/2-year, $45-million face lift to the leafy 1.1-mile avenue, which stretches from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe. The make-over was unveiled last week, with Mayor Jacques Chirac throwing the switch on 1,000 emerald green floodlights.

Chirac proudly claimed that the Champs-Elysees “has recovered all its prestige (and) the magical character which it had in the subconscious of the French and of foreigners.”

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That verdict, ultimately, will be rendered by the rest of France and the world. But the street has, without doubt, undergone quite a transformation, with more than 227 new trees, 51 benches of tropical wood (costing more than $4,000 each), new bus shelters, and newspaper kiosks and street lamps designed in turn-of-the-century style.

The biggest plus for the millions of French and tourists who clog the avenue every day are the new wide granite sidewalks. The narrow streets on either side of the avenue, where hapless motorists once hunted for parking spaces, are gone. Now, the sidewalks are 65 feet wide and parking can be found in a new lot built underground.

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Scott Kraft

Scott Kraft is editor at large for enterprise journalism and special projects at the Los Angeles Times, where he oversees the Investigations department, standards and practices, polling and survey research projects, and newsroom-wide reporting initiatives. He works closely with departments across the newsroom to elevate series and is leading an initiative to actively develop books that are an outgrowth of Times’ expertise and original reporting, in partnership with commercial book publishers. During nearly four decades at The Times, Kraft has been managing editor, deputy managing editor/news and national editor, as well as a foreign and national correspondent. As an editor, he has directed work that won nine Pulitzer Prizes. As a reporter, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing while a New York-based national correspondent for the Associated Press before joining The Times in its Chicago bureau. He spent a decade abroad as The Times’ bureau chief in Nairobi, Johannesburg and Paris. He covered the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid as well as the ill-fated U.S. military mission in Somalia, among other major stories. His story for the Los Angeles Times magazine on the AIDS epidemic in Africa won the SPJ Distinguished Service Award for Foreign Correspondence. He has served as both a juror and chair of the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. He also was a Pulitzer Prize juror in international reporting in 2014 and subsequently chaired five Pulitzer juries – Public Service in 2015, International Reporting in 2020, Explanatory Reporting in 2021, Illustrated Reporting and Commentary in 2022 and Editorial Writing in 2023. He is currently president of the Overseas Press Club of America. Kraft was born in Kansas City, Mo., and has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Kansas State University.

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