This grandiose and impressively wide avenue is the city’s most famous thoroughfare, home to a string of luxury boutiques. Highly fashionable during the Second Empire period, it has preserved its fine avenues of chestnut trees, theatres and a few restaurants from this period in its lower section from Place de la Concorde to the Rond-Point. In its upper section, up to Place de l'Étoile, private houses have for the most part disappeared, to be replaced by cafés, cinemas and shopping arcades.