38 min
40 min
2 · 3 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 12 · RER A · RER E
88.8 / km²
10
15
3,636
+6% vs city
Counted from OpenStreetMap and Inside Airbnb (CC BY 4.0)
Staying in Opera & Pigalle (9th)
The 9th is where the mid-range hotels are, and there are a lot of them: this is the district the coach tours and the department stores share. Galeries Lafayette and Printemps are on boulevard Haussmann, the Opera Garnier is at the southern corner, and the passages and Grands Boulevards theatres run east from it.
The interesting half is the north. South Pigalle - SoPi, if you must - is now bars, small restaurants and the best cocktails in the city, on streets that were the fading sex trade twenty years ago and are half-and-half today. Boulevard de Clichy along the top boundary is still the sex shops and the strip clubs, and the blocks either side of place Pigalle are the ones to look at on a map before booking.
Between the two, the middle of the arrondissement is nothing much - offices, apartment blocks and the Saint-Lazare approaches. Rates reflect that, which is the reason to be here: a four-star in the 9th costs what a three-star costs in the 1st, and Notre-Dame is a forty-minute walk or four stops on metro 7.
What works
- Four-star rooms at three-star money by central Paris standards
- Galeries Lafayette, Printemps and the Opera Garnier are all inside it
- South Pigalle has the best bar and small-restaurant strip in the city
- Metro 7 reaches Chatelet in about eight minutes; RER A and E both stop here
What does not
- Nearly forty minutes on foot to Notre-Dame
- Boulevard de Clichy and place Pigalle are still the sex trade
- The middle of the arrondissement is offices and has nothing in it
- Hotels around the department stores sit on coach-tour streets
By way of contrast, the fading red-light and cheap shopping district of Pigalle is in the north of the 9th, closely adjoining Montmartre on the hill above in the 18th.In between the two, relatively-speaking, lies a traveller's no-man's-land / terra incognita - though the streets around St Lazare used to be the Impressionists stronghold in Paris.