Montparnasse

In the early 17th century, construction rubble from demolished buildings accumulated into an impromptu mound at the southern edge of Paris, just outside the city walls. Students from the nearby colleges, with the classical education that French universities still required, nicknamed this heap Mont Parnasse after Mount Parnassus in Greece, the mythological seat of Apollo and the nine Muses. The name was ironic at first, a jest about broken stone being sacred ground for poetry. By 1650 the rubble had been cleared and the mound leveled, but the name stayed attached to the district.

The original Parnassus is a massif in Boeotia, central Greece, rising to 2,457 meters, and Greek tradition held it sacred to Apollo and the Muses. When Hesiod described the Muses breathing poetic gift into him on the slopes of the neighboring Helicon around 700 BC, Parnassus was already the name for everything poetry aspired toward. Renaissance humanists adopted Parnassus as shorthand for literary excellence: Raphael painted his Parnassus fresco in the Vatican Stanze between 1509 and 1511, crowding it with Homer, Virgil, and Dante. A Parisian rubble heap named after it promised, however mockingly, to house something worth creating.

The neighborhood grew through the 18th and 19th centuries as cafes, theaters, and cheap lodgings colonized the southern Left Bank. When rents in Montmartre began rising in the 1910s, artists and writers crossed the river to the cheaper south. By the 1920s, Montparnasse had become the center of Paris's expatriate literary and artistic world: Hemingway drank at the Closerie des Lilas, Modigliani painted in a studio off the Boulevard Raspail, and Man Ray photographed on the Rue Campagne-Première. The Café du Dôme and the Rotonde kept their doors open through the night for anyone who needed a table.

The Gare Montparnasse, opened in 1840 and rebuilt in 1969 as a modernist tower-and-station complex, gave the name a second career as a transit hub serving Brittany and the Atlantic southwest. The Tour Montparnasse, completed in 1973 at 210 meters, became the only skyscraper in central Paris. Public outcry after its construction led to a ban on tall buildings inside Paris's périphérique. The rubble heap from which students once launched ironic invocations of the Muses was now best known for an elevator ride to the top of a tower that Parisians would prefer not to see.