“It is in the morning, before six o’ clock, that the ‘Halles’ must be visited, if one wants to see the stunning spectacle of the ‘criée’ (sale by auction).” (p. 15, “Second Day Morning”).
When we visited the former Les Halles market site, my first thought was to see what the Guilmin Guide had to say about it. The “Halles Centrales,” as Guilmin refers to it, seems to be fully functioning in its original market state and in its present location (as seen in the second day map below) at the time of the publication. The time of publication, of course, being during WWII, presumably a very short amount of time before the “Halles Centrales” as Guilmin knew it was destroyed. It seems to me that since this guide was clearly meant for a one-time use, the publisher didn’t bother with alluding to a specific publication date, which is a real shame that leaves me only guessing at its specific context within the war. This “stomach of Paris” has gone through so many iterations, though none seem to be as much of a spectacle as the version written about here, described as being “entirely built of iron and cast-iron, occupy[ing] an area of 70,000 square meters.” Though early in its evolution, before its face and use have changed entirely, Guilmin is careful to note that this is only the “Halles Centrales” seen “to-day,” discussing the construction of the current structure by Baltard under Napolean III’s reign and its modeling after the architecture of “the railway station.”
With all of the installments of this blog so far, I’ve been hesitant to fact-check any of the information, hoping to only compare the Guilmin Guide’s descriptions to what we learned while at each site and, for the most part, it has been relatively similar. This spot, however, enticed me to want to learn more, especially since Guilmin was so careful to include a timeline and architect. With just a cursory search, I found SO many different “timelines” of the changes to Les Halles, as well as found it used as the backdrop to so many other stories and histories.
Though the current Les Halles (metro and RER hellscape/pretty cool mall)* looks VERY different than the original market and functions a little more as the wallet of Paris than its stomach, I really appreciated this beige and glass wave-like structure for its modern interpretations of this Parisian hub and attention to this sort of spatial adaptive reuse.