26 min
40 min
3 · 4 · 8 · 9 · RER A
133.7 / km²
0
5
2,872
+30% vs city
Counted from OpenStreetMap and Inside Airbnb (CC BY 4.0)
Staying in Sentier & Grands Boulevards (2nd)
The 2nd is 99 hectares, the smallest of the twenty, and you can cross it in fifteen minutes. Rue Montorgueil runs up the eastern side and is a working food street - fishmongers, cheese, a queue outside the bakery at 08:00 - rather than a restored one, and the covered passages off rue des Petits Champs are 19th-century shopping arcades with glass roofs, which is the correct thing to do with a wet afternoon in Paris.
It is also the financial district, so the western half around the Bourse is offices, and dead from Friday evening until Monday morning. The eastern edge along rue Saint-Denis has been a red-light street since the Renaissance and still is at the northern end, which is worth knowing before you book a rate that looks too good for the postcode.
What you get for the trade is a room a few minutes' walk from the 1st and the Marais at a rate closer to the 9th, with metro 3, 4, 8 and 9 crossing the district and RER A at Auber. Nothing here is a sight, which is exactly why it is cheaper.
What works
- Rue Montorgueil is a food street residents actually shop on
- Rates run under the 1st and the 4th for a walk of the same length
- Metro 3, 4, 8 and 9 cross it, with RER A at Auber
- The covered passages are indoors, which matters between November and March
What does not
- The Bourse half is offices and shuts from Friday night to Monday
- The rue Saint-Denis edge is still a working red-light street
- No park and no square inside the whole arrondissement
- Nothing here is a sight, so the sightseeing starts one street away
The 2nd is home to the galleries—covered passages lined with shops—which are quite possibly the prototypes of today's shopping malls. One finds shops, cafés and hotels inside.While the aforementioned are all daylight activities, the east end of the arrondissement has an entirely different reputation, having been home to Paris's red-light district since sometime in the early renaissance.