“No hundred-year-old tree will be cut down.
“This Saturday afternoon, Emmanuel Grégoire, first deputy (PS) of the socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo, sought to extinguish the fire lit by opponents of the project to redevelop the Eiffel Tower district.
Since the middle of the week, associations and personalities have denounced the planned felling of around twenty trees, some of which are very old, at the foot of the monument.
According to those around Emmanuel Grégoire, this promise applies to "two century-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.
No hundred-year-old tree will be felled, we make the commitment.
The development project around the Eiffel Tower has undergone several changes since 2019.
We will soon have the opportunity to present the details.
➡️ https://t.co/0ZhOehkFf3 pic.twitter.com/IaiDnwsJGE
— Emmanuel Grégoire (@egregoire) April 30, 2022
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 .
But also 227 new trees planted, argues the entourage of Emmanuel Grégoire, assistant to town planning.
The project as a whole must allow the creation of 1.6 ha of green spaces, still insists the town hall.
“They create vegetation but they destroy a lot of it”
Not enough to calm opponents: a petition launched on the change.org site, and relayed by the host Nagui, the journalist Hugo Clément or the ex-boss of Medef Laurence Parisot had exceeded 39,500 signatories at the end of the day. .
“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.
This project also embarrasses environmentalists, who had allowed its adoption in February in exchange for a moratorium on the repair of the Champ-de-Mars.
The elected EELV Aminata Niakate, who had carried this "difficult balance" for her group, still believes "that no argument holds water" to justify the luggage storage, which a neighboring site could accommodate.
A few days earlier, the France nature environment association (FNE) Paris, followed by the National Tree Monitoring Group (GNSA), had denounced the felling of 77 trees in eastern Paris, Porte de Montreuil, subject of another major town hall redevelopment project.
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.
