Passy station

Passy (French: [pasi] ^ⓘ) is an above-ground station on Line 6 of the Paris Métro in the 16th arrondissement.

The station and its approaches have notable views, as it is built on a viaduct that abuts the slope of the 25 meter high Chaillot hill just below its crest.  Eastbound trains exit the station onto the Pont de Bir-Hakim bridge over the Seine. Westbound trains enter a tunnel under the hill. The Rue Marietta-Alboni runs under the viaduct from the Seine to the foot of the slope, where it becomes two parallel sets of pedestrian stairways to the hilltop, whence the Rue resumes. The station is entered from the stairways. An upward-moving escalator parallels the northern stairway.

The metro and the stairways bisect the Square Alboni, a chic residential subdivision on the hillside whose properties were assembled and developed between 1894 and 1930. Named, like the Rue, after a famous opera contralto of the day, the Square has several buildings designed by Louis Dauvergne, with the others intended to harmonize. The buildings around the Square and the (private) park in its center, are not much visible from the platform, but can be seen from the stairways and the streets. Dauvergne also designed Les Grands Hôtels du Trocadéro, the now-iconic turreted buildings on both sides of the Rue Marietta-Alboni above and below the hillside. They were built as hotels for visitors to the 1900 International Exposition and afterwards rented as apartments.

The Rue Marietta-Alboni has a width of only 15 meters (including sidewalks), as compared to the 40-meter width of the Boulevards Extérieurs over which the other elevated sections of Lines 2 and 6 were built. The land for the Rue was given to the city by the subdivision developers in 1893.