Work to replace the wooden decking of the Pont des Arts, the famous Parisian footbridge spanning the Seine to connect the 1st and 6th arrondissements, began on April 18, 2023. Announced for 2022, the renovation site began with the removal of part of the structure’s wooden deck, giving a glimpse of the river below, under the steel structure.
As AFP recalls, the operation comes after years of criticism of the capital’s town hall, accused of letting the bridge decay. The replacement of some 1,600 square meters of wood must now be spread over two phases, to be completed at the beginning of September. Costing 1.8 million euros, the construction site nevertheless makes it possible to renovate the footbridge on each side of its length while leaving it accessible.
A “very resistant” African wood
The teams selected as a replacement material badi, or bilinga, an exotic wood from Africa known to be “very resistant”, explained Ambroise Dufayet, head of the Seine and engineering structures section at the Roads Department. This “wood which is a little lighter, but which is beginning to patina”, will be transported by barge in four stages from Bonneuil-sur-Marne, in the Val-de-Marne. It is also there that the old oak cladding dating from 2005 will be returned.
The LR mayor of the 6th arrondissement, Jean-Pierre Lecoq, refused to go to the launch of the construction site, deploring that the rehabilitation took place “years after (s) his first requests (…)”. For her part, Karen Taïeb, the PS heritage assistant to Anne Hidalgo, the city councilor of the capital, invoked “incompressible times” for municipal services. “There are a lot of construction sites at the moment,” added the PCF construction assistant, Jacques Baudrier, pointing out that the three footbridges of the Saint-Martin canal had also been modernized recently.
Built between 1801 and 1804, the bridge – or footbridge – des Arts connects the Institut de France to the Louvre Museum. Reserved for pedestrians, it has already been restored several times after bombardments and shipping accidents, and completely rebuilt between 1982 and 1984. Under the weight, estimated at several tens of tons, of the million famous “love padlocks”, part of the bridge’s fence collapsed in 2014. The municipality then replaced it with glass panels to prevent tourists from installing new ones.
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