The flat gray footbridge between the two islands is the Pont Saint-Louis. Take a good look at it, because it is — and I say this with affection — the plainest bridge in Paris. No statues, no lamps worth photographing, no gold. Steel deck, gray paint, done. It connects the two prettiest islands in the city, and it looks like something you'd find behind a warehouse.
There's a reason for that. This is the seventh bridge on this spot, because the first six died.
The original went up in the sixteen thirties, in wood. One account says it gave way under a religious procession — which is a rough review of your carpentry. A later wooden one was carried off by ice floes grinding down the river. In seventeen seventeen they built a handsome seven-arch bridge painted with red lead — Parisians called it the Red Bridge. About eighty years later, a flood swept it away entirely. The nineteenth-century replacement got hit by barges so many times that it finally gave up and collapsed in nineteen thirty
-nine. For thirty years after that, the two islands were joined by what everyone described as a temporary metal cage.
The current bridge opened in nineteen seventy. Flat, gray, zero decoration — and it holds. At one point the city floated plans to replace it with something prettier, and the islanders petitioned to keep the ugly one. It works, they said. Leave it alone. After three centuries of wa
