There hundred municipal employees worked for a week to transform the express motorway along the Seine into "Paris-plage", spending €1.5 million in taxpayers' money.
Waste, gimmick, gadget, demagoguery were all words that flashed through my mind. Who but the French, I thought, would install 80 palm trees in big white planters, 300 bright blue deck chairs, 130 beach umbrellas, 22 blue-and-white striped beach huts, two garden hose "mist machines" for visitors to cool off, a fake cliff for abseiling, trampolines, a miniature golf course, a pétanque (bowling) ground and a sandy volley-ball court in front of City Hall - and label it all "land art"?
I take back the snide comments. Bertrand Delanoë, the socialist mayor of Paris, is offering a lesson in the art of living. The 3.8 km stretch of river-side highway between the Tuileries and the Henri IV bridge has been "reclaimed" from the automobile until August 18th, and already there are pleas to make it permanent. More than half a million people visited the site when it opened on July 21st. Virtually everyone smiles on "Paris Beach" - as if al-Qaeda, the falling stock market, corrupt politicians and global warming had momentarily vanished.
Men, women and children of every race, size, age and description walk down the temporary pedestrian district informally dubbed "la promenade des Anglais" after the Nice seafront. Bicycles - which you can rent for €4.60 per day - wend their way through the crowds. There's a beginners' class in roller-blading, and free skates on loan for the reckless. It is lunch time and businessmen wearing ties and jackets slope down the traffic ramps towards the cafés, grinning. Women in swimsuits lie on beach towels on narrow strips of lawn and sand opposite the Île de la Cité, amid the scent of burning croque-monsieurs and suntan lotion. Nudity and swimming are forbidden.
"It's brilliant!" I hear a middle-aged Dublin man say to his wife. Rod and Deirdre and their American friend Virginia have temporarily lost their children, but they don't seem worried. "When you have limited road space, dividing it up and giving some back is a lovely concept," Rod enthuses.
There's no reason Dublin couldn't experiment, he says. Start out by closing certain roads on Sunday, as Mayor Delanoë did last year. "I can imagine it from the Custom House down - on both sides, for roller-bladers and skate-boards. In Dublin, when demonstrators tried to reclaim the streets, they were beaten by the guards; here, an official has done it! With the Greens so strong in Dáil Éireann, they should take an initiative."
"It's amazing the ambiance you can create with just a few deck chairs and parasols," Deirdre adds.
"If this was New York, there would be advertisements all over," Virginia joins in.
Mayor Delanoë calls his initiative "a lunatic dream". One of his goals is to bring underprivileged people from the suburbs into the city centre, and it is working. Samir (28), a second-generation Moroccan immigrant, is stretched out on a deck chair.
He has taken the RER - the Paris equivalent of the Dart - from La Courneuve twice, and stays all day. He'd like to meet a girl "if there's an opportunity - but I'm not in a hurry". Rozenn (42) had brought her Franco-Irish daughter Maureen (3) from Vincennes. "Since I had children, I don't come into Paris much. Paris-plage made me want to return. I'm going to call all my girlfriends and tell them."
As for the motorists, who are furious at Mr Delanoë's creation, "too bad", says Rozenn. "A city is not just people going to and from work; it should be a place where you want to linger."
Anne (74) had brought her three year-old grand-daughter, Clara. "We have a great mayor. He understands the needs of a certain type of citizen," she says. What type? "Those who are not obsessed with work and the clock," she replies. "We really needed this; Parisians were getting more and more rude and impatient."
When the late president Georges Pompidou created highways on the banks of the Seine in 1967, he boasted that he was serving "the four-wheeled Parisian". The French Federation of Automobile Clubs and Highway Users accuses the socialist mayor and his Green allies of adopting "a systematic anti-car policy" whose goal is to close permanently the banks of the Seine to traffic.
Mr Denis Baupin, the deputy mayor in charge of transport, says 75 per cent of Parisians now use public transport at rush hour, and the number of bicyclists has risen by 4 per cent since Mr Delanoë began building special bike and bus lanes that are separated from cars by a cement barrier.