Paris during the Second Empire the Service des Promenades et Plantations, directly under the Prefect Haussmann. The first director was Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, who designed all the new parks of Paris and the avenues and trees along the boulevards, small squares and gardens in the city. The most popular promenade for the wealthier Parisians began at the Place de la Concorde, went up the Champs-Elysees to the Place de l'Étoile, and then turned onto the Avenue de l'Impératrice (today the Avenue Foch), the widest avenue in the city, which was the ceremonial entry to the new Bois de Boulogne. Once in the park, the promenaders
Avenue Foch Avenue de la Grand Armée. Haussmann scrapped this plan and instead called for an avenue at least one hundred meters wide, wider than the Champs-Elysées between the Arc de Triomphe and the new Bois de Boulogne. Its purpose was to provide an impressive grand approach for fashionable Parisians to promenade from the center of the city to the Park in their carriages, to see and be seen. It was to be called the Avenue de l'Impératrice, the Avenue of the Empress, for the Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III. The Avenue was built by Jean-Charles Alphand, the chief engineer