You might know this: You come back into a neighborhood where you haven’t been for a while, and a shop you remember has changed. The cute little tearoom has become a shoe store, or the flower shop has been transformed into a bookstore.
Sometimes I come across shops where you can see what they used to be – generally something very different. Let me show you some of them.
This place in the Marais neighborhood (4th arrondissement) used to buy horses, as “achat de chevaux” indicates, certainly to transform them into meat which would have been sold at a horse butcher’s, a boucherie chevaline, recognizable by the horse head over the entrance.
This former Hamman (also in the Marais) now houses a fashion store on the ground floor, just like this bakery.
Here we have a former fishmonger’s that clearly doesn’t sell anything any longer.
This fishmonger’s, on the other hand, seems to have traded the sale of poissons, fish, for the sale of boissons, drinks.
Check out the first letter up close!
