THE HALLES OF PARIS
It was September 15th 1851 when Napoleon Bonaparte officially laid the first stone marking the construction of the ten pavilions of the …“Halles of Paris”…, which went from 1854 to 1871.
In 1873, Emile Zola published “The Stomach of Paris”, inspired by these Halles that daily animated the center of the French capital. In 1969, the businesses that were in the Halles of Paris were transferred to new buildings in Rungis, a suburb of Paris.
The Halles, in the awaiting of their demolition, where occupied by diverse cultural activities and associations, which where opposed to the disappearance of such a building to which they hoped to give another destiny than the one envisioned by the promoters of the future “Forum des Halles”.
The demolition date was set to be August 2nd 1971.
It was that day that Alain Charles CHAYER decided to fix, on a black and white film ILFORD PANCHROMATIC EXTRA FINE GRAIN, with a NIKON F equipped with a NIKKOR 2/50 mm lens, all the graphic traces, the posters, the diverse inscriptions which were the testimonies of the desire of a population to give a new life to a symbolic and centenarian architecture.
After sneaking in the secured building, Alain Charles Chayer took 250 pictures, witnesses of a fight of what was the stomach of Paris for a century to only become its soul.
At the end of the day, Alain Charles CHAYER was thrown out of the building by the police who was ordered to keep “The Halles of Paris” empty for destruction.
These pictures, published for the first time, are 53 (fifty three) years old.
