Cut down twenty trees to build luggage storage for visitors to the Eiffel Tower? The project of the town hall of Paris is denounced by associations and personalities. A sling which has grown this weekend and which puts the municipality in the embarrassment.
“No century-old tree will be cut down”: Saturday afternoon, Emmanuel Grégoire, first deputy to the socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo, sought to extinguish the fire lit since mid-week by opponents of the redevelopment project for the district of La Eiffel Tower.
A widely publicized online petition
According to the entourage of the first deputy, this promise applies to “two hundred-year-old trees” for which the town hall “will find a solution”. For the others, “the goal is to reduce the number of felled trees as much as possible”, indicates the same source, stressing that the town hall had already “succeeded in lowering the figure” from 42 to 22.
Not enough to calm the opponents: a petition launched on the change.org site, and relayed by the very popular radio and television host Nagui or the ex-boss of Medef (the employers’ union, Editor’s note) Laurence Parisot recorded tens of thousands of signatures.
It was enough for the first municipal opponent of Anne Hidalgo, Rachida Dati (LR), to denounce the project. The former Minister of Justice relayed several messages on Twitter this Saturday.
In place of these trees, the “OnE” project, which aims to green and pedestrianize the world-famous perspective from the Trocadero to the Iron Lady, provides luggage storage for visitors and premises for employees, semi-underground buildings .
They create vegetation but they destroy a lot of it
But also 227 new trees planted, argues the entourage of Emmanuel Gregoire, assistant to town planning. The project as a whole must allow the creation of 1.6 hectares of green spaces, still insists the town hall.
“They create vegetation but they destroy a lot of it”, deplores Philippe Khayat, member of the SOS Paris association for whom, in addition to the felled trees, two plane trees “more than a hundred years old” will be “weakened” and ultimately “condemned. by constructing a building “1.5 m” from them.
Anne Hidalgo has made the greening of the capital a major objective of her second term, with promises to plant 170,000 additional trees or create five “urban forests” and four new parks.