Place des États-Unis

Paris - La Belle Époque

The Place des États-Unis, "United States Square") is a public space in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France, about 500 m south of the Place de l'Étoile and the Arc de Triomphe.

It consists of a plaza, approximately 140 metres long and thirty metres wide, tree-lined, well-landscaped, and circumscribed by streets, forming a pleasant and shady vest-pocket park. The park is officially named Square Thomas Jefferson, but buildings facing it (on three sides) have Place-des-États-Unis addresses. The eastern end of the square, however, is capped by the Avenue d'Iéna and a confluence of streets known as the Place de l'Amiral de Grasse. These streets, all of which lead to the eastern end of Place des États-Unis, are the Rue Freycinet, Rue de Lübeck, Rue de Bassano, and the Rue Georges Bizet.

Other streets entering the Place des États-Unis include: the Rue de l'Amiral d'Estaing, which enters from the south; the Rue Galilée, which transits the western end of Square Thomas Jefferson; and the Rue Dumont d'Urville which enters the northwestern corner.

Name origin

The area around the Place des États-Unis was created by the destruction of the old Passy[1] water reservoirs. (They were reconstructed in 1866 on higher ground, in the triangle formed by three streets: Lauriston, Paul Valéry, and Copernic, about two hundred metres to the west-northwest.) The Place des États-Unis was originally called Place de Bitche to honor a town in the Moselle department in northeastern France that valiantly resisted the Prussian invasion during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

The square's name was changed after Levi P. Morton, the American ambassador to France, established his residence and his country's embassy there in 1881 after abandoning unsuitable offices a few blocks away at 95, Rue de Chaillot. The similarity between the name of the Moselle city, Bitche, and the slightly off-color English word, bitch, made the Americans uncomfortable, so the chargé d'affaires prevailed upon the préfet for the Seine department to change the name to something less risible. The French official arranged for the name, Place de Bitche, to be transferred to another site in the 19th arrondissement, near the Pont de Crimée. He renamed the square outside the ambassador's legation as Place des États-Unis.

The Statue of Liberty (model)

On 13 May 1885, a bronze model of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World) by Frédéric Bartholdi was erected in the center of the Place des États-Unis, directly in front of the American diplomatic mission.[2] Purchased by the Committee of Americans in Paris and offered to the City of Paris, the model was a fund-raising tool, displayed with the aim of inspiring support for the building of the full-sized statue and its transport across the Atlantic. The model remained in place until 1888. Statue of Washington and Lafayette Famed publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911), impressed by the work Bartholdi had done in executing the Statue of Liberty, commissioned him to produce another statue, one emblematic of the French-American friendship. The subject matter, General George Washington and Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, comrades-in-arms during the American Revolutionary War, was an easy choice. The sculptor designed the bronze statue, which depicts Washington and Lafayette on a marble plinth, clothed in military uniforms, shaking hands; the French and American flags serve as a backdrop. Dedicated in 1895, the statue was installed in the Place des États-Unis. A few years later, Charles Broadway Rouss, the New York City department-store tycoon, purchased an exact replica of the Washington-and-Lafayette statue which he donated to the people of New York City for placement in Morningside Park in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.