A Special Exposition of the Paris Pages:
The Eiffel Tower, and Obelisque of Place de La Concorde from just in front of
the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume circa 1923.
Vintage Paris Postcards - Page 1 
Text and images copyright (c) 1995 Carolyn Daily O'Connor - used with permission.
Scanning assistance and html by
Norman Barth and
Mark Olson of ARTFL.
I have been absorbing information about Paris all of my life. When "American in Paris" came out in
1951, I was 12. My mother took all three of us children to see it. The movie still has a lot to do with
how I view Paris.
Most postcards are general views. The close-ups are real collector's items -- finding them and
paying for them. I used my Michelin Guide to Paris (the edition purchased for a 1981 trip) to
identify as many of the places in the postcard I could.
My visits to Paris were in 1965 (three days on
an initial tour to Europe); 1967 (four days with my sister and my first Bastille Day there); June 1980
(five days by myself when I added the Place des Vosges to my favorite areas; October 1980 (five
days with my Mother before and after a trip to the Châteaux of the Loire) when I got some great
slides of the Luxembourg Gardens with fall color -- an early frost that year;
May 1981 (five days in
Paris with two friends on a trip that included Mont St. Michel, Nimes, Avignon, Vezelay and
Fontainbleau); March 1982 (two weeks just in Paris with one sidetrip up the Seine with a
French-speaking group to try out the French I had been taking at the Alliance Francais in Chicago);
October 1982 (three days in Paris on my honeymoon): and return visits to Paris with my husband the
summers of 1984 and 1986.
I've stayed in hotels on the Champs-Elysées and the Opera Quarter but definitely am a Left Bank
person. On three of the last four visits we stayed at the Hotel de Seine on Rue de Seine -- not quite
as noisy as the heart of the Latin Quarter but still lots of street life.
Several of the cards were in French. I could get the gist of the messages but couldn't transcribe them
word for word in French let alone translate the whole message. I've given you a flavor of the
messages and included whole messages from cards in English that I thought had something to say.
Most of the postcards are from the first decade of this century. The newest one used is more than 75
years old.
To page 2 of Vintage Paris Postcards.
