Paris paved the parking lot, and put up the pyramids

It’s hard to imagine, standing in front of the massive glass pyramid that dominates the inner courtyard of Paris’s Musée du Louvre, that just a generation ago it was a parking lot.

Old pictures from the time of I.M. Pei’s pyramids’ construction show cars lining the central 16th-century building and its later additions. Cars also jam up the roads leading past the courtyard — five lanes in all.

The parking and the traffic are all gone now. Early in the morning when I visited on a recent vacation, the courtyard was silent and peaceful, before the crowds of tourists arrived, but even once they’re there, there’s no din of engine noise and tires, no cars to dodge, no exhaust to breathe.

It’s a human-oriented place, befitting of the intensely human nature of the collection of some of histor