| At the heart of the 2e arrondissement lies the Sentier district, largely given over to the rag trade. The frenetic trading and deliveries of cloth, the food market on rue des Petits-Carreaux, and the general to-ing and fro-ing make a lively change from the office-bound quartiers further west. On place du Caire, beneath an extraordinary pseudo-Egyptian facade of grotesque Pharaonic heads (a celebration of Napoleon's conquest of Egypt), an archway opens onto a series of arcades, the passage du Caire. This, contrary to any visible evidence, is the oldest of all the passages and entirely monopolized by wholesale clothes shops. The garment business gets progressively more upmarket as you head west from the trade area. Louis XIV's attractive place des Victoires, adjoined to the north by the appealingly asymmetrical place des Petits-Pères, is full of designer clothes shops, with extravagant window displays and matching price tags. The trend continues on the upper stretch of rue Étienne Marcel, with young, hip fashion boutiques taking over at the lower end. Just north of M° Étienne-Marcel, between rue St-Denis and rue Dessoubs, arches the three-storey Grand-Cerf, stylistically the best of all the passages. The wrought-iron work, glass roof and plain-wood shop fronts have all been cleaned, attracting stylish arts, crafts and contemporary design shops. Running north from here, rue St-Denis is the city's centuries-old red-light area. Attempts by the 2e arrondissement mairie to rid the street of its pimps and prostitutes have been to no avail; despite pedestrianizing the area between rues Étienne-Marcel and Réaumur (to stop kerb-crawling) and encouraging cafés like the English FrogandRosbif to move in among the porn outlets, there are still weary women waiting in doorways between peepshows, striptease joints and sex-video shops. The emphasis on rues Montmartre, Montorgueil and Turbigo, leading south from rue Réaumur, turns towards food as they approach Les Halles. Worth lingering over in particular is pedestrianized rue Montorgueil, where traditional grocery stalls, butchers and patissiers of longstanding (one, Stohrer's, has been here since 1730) ply their trade alongside newer arrivals.
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