Old Paris Is No More

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra

Native speakers usualllly ignore the articles from another language unless there was a cultural reason not to. It also just sounds better to my native ear.

My sense of distance was thrown off by how monstrously huge the Arc is. I don't know where they take the pictures of it from, but standing across the street from it I had to just about stand on my head to get the whole thing into frame on my camera.

And as big as the Arc is, the Napoleonic Louvre is bigger (And, I might add, covered with his initial, like a child marking his belongings). And they additions were made in such a way that from the outside it looks five times bigger than it is. There's a certain element of shock and awe going on here.

The only thing I've seen on a similar scale is the Washington Monument, and you understand why all the pictures of the Lincoln statue make it look like it's immediately behind the pillars. It is not. It's on the far end of a large room, also too big to get into frame. It's just so big that it destroys perspective.

To people confronted with this for the first time, I can see how they might wonder why they didn't stop at a smaller monument. In an era without high rises, there's a bit of grotesquery about the scale of these things. They were paid for on the backs of the lower class. I'm sure it was a very concrete image of the slide back into monarchy.

The only thing I've seen on a similar scale in the US, aside from nature, is the Lincoln Memorial. Seeing the monument, you understand why all the pictures of the Lincoln statue make it look like it's immediately behind the pillars. It is not. It's on the far end of a large room, also too big to get into frame. It's just so big that it destroys perspective.

Now, in an era of high rise apartments, the ridiculous proportions prevent these buildings from simply being swallowed in a sea of truly mundane buildings of comparable size. And that is probably why these places have such a tourist draw even today.

Don't underestimate just how lazy and safety obsessed Cops, so they'd need a partner to go with them to enter on foot.

Police do bike through once in a while when it's summer, usually in groups of 4-6 but Toronto isn't always accessible by bike during winter. Plus I rarely saw bike cops at night like you do cars cruising around.

These isolated places with towering buildings, tons of concrete, and only roads deep outside on the edges creates an excellent environment for shootings, robberies, and drug dealing to take place.

Either way it increases the effort it takes and almost all of them have full time security on site as the problems are constant.

Down the road there are 3 large buildings one by one lined on a major road which are equally in disrepair and impoverished, and they dont have people constantly hanging out side against the walls next to rear stairwell entrances, while everyone else is scared to go there at night. The keep their business inside or out of view.

There's a hundred examples of these places that are set up like this in NYC and Chicago.

Cabrini Green had the same issue with too many enclosed areas where people hung around constantly. The design was counter to open and friendly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes?ol...

They are called "Angsträume", translation is "spaces of fear". Dark, secluded spaces, staircases and so forth, where people feel unsafe.