Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

This guide to Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris starts with the stone bridge in front of you, which claimed twenty-nine lives in a single year, 1896, and earned the nickname Pont des Suicidés. It steps back further, through the site's earlier lives as a gypsum quarry and dumping ground, and before that as the Montfaucon gallows, where the crown once hanged criminals and left the bodies on display. From there it follows Napoleon III's order to build a park for the working poor of the northeast, and the engineers, including Gustave Eiffel, who carved cliffs and flooded a lake to make it happen. Look across the water at the Temple de la Sibylle crowning the rocky island.