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Place DAUPHINE
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| Arrondissement | Ier |
| Quarter | Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, Île de la Cité |
| Begins | Rue de Harlay |
| Ends | Rue Henri Robert |
| Length | 102 m |
| Width | 12 to 67 m |
| Creation | 1580-1611 |
| Denomination | 1580-1792, then from 1814 onward |
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The Place Dauphine
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The Place Dauphine is a public square located near the western end of the Île de la Cité in the first arrondissement of Paris. From the "square", actually triangular in shape, one can access the middle of the ancient bridge called the Pont Neuf. The bridge connects the left and right banks of the Seine by passing over the Île de la Cité. A street called, since 1948, Rue Henri-Robert, forty metres long, connects the Place Dauphine and the bridge. Where they meet, there are two other named places, the Place du Pont Neuf and the Square du Vert Galent.
The Place Dauphine was constructed on the site of three riverine islets, scarcely more than mudbanks at the time. During the 17th century, this location represented the second place in Paris, after the Place des Vosges, where the French royal court established a permanent seat.
The Place Dauphine, laid out in 1609 while the Place des Vosges was still under construction, was named for the Dauphin of France, the future Louis XIII.[1] It was among the earliest city-planning projects of Henri IV.
The Place Dauphine space, originally a rectangle with two canted ends, was conveyed to Achille du Harlay with instruction to construct thirty-two houses adhering to a single plan. They built a kind of quadrangle with a gateway centered on the "downstream" (western) end, formed by paired pavilions facing the equestrian statue of Henri IV on the far side of the Pont Neuf. The houses are built of brick with limestone quoins, and they have arcaded ground-floors capped by steep slate roofs with dormers, very like the contemporaneous facades at the Place des Vosges.
Few visitors actually penetrate the Place Dauphine, which lies behind the gates, where all of the surrounding buildings have been raised in height, given new facades, rebuilt, or replaced with imitations of the originals. The former east-side enclosure was swept aside, in the eighteenth century, to open the view toward the monumental white-marble Second-Empire Palais de Justice (built from 1857 to 1868).[2][3]
The Place Dauphine is:
| Located near the metro stations: Pont Neuf or Cité. |
It is served by lines 4 and 7.