The Iron Pavilions That Defined a City
My interest in Les Halles started back when I was a Stripper. More about that later.
Step back in time to the Paris of the 19th century. Picture the narrow, winding streets, the old stone buildings, and, right at the heart of it all, a chaotic, noisy marketplace: Les Halles.
The Iron Age
By the mid-1800s, Paris was bursting at the seams. The old market at Les Halles, which had been feeding Parisians for centuries, was a jumble of overcrowded stalls and decaying sheds. Napoleon III wanted to drag Paris into the modern age. He tasked Baron Haussmann with reshaping the city, and Les Halles was high on the list for a makeover.
The emperor wanted something modern — “iron, iron, nothing but iron!” he famously declared. Victor Baltard delivered a series of twelve airy, well-lit pavilions made of iron and glass, which rose up between 1854 and 1874.
Each pavilion specialized in different goods – poultry, eggs, butter, cheese, bread, fruits, and vegetables.
Parisians quickly fell in love with the new Les Halles. The market became known as “the belly of Paris,” a phrase immortalized by Émile Zola in his novel “Le Ventre de Paris.”
From midnight to noon, the place was crowded with vendors shouting prices and porters hauling crates, the smells of fresh bread, ripe cheese, and fish mingling in the air.
Even if you weren’t shopping, you might find yourself in one of the many bistros around the market, grabbing a quick bite and soaking up the energy.
Before Les Halles
But Les Halles wasn’t born in the 19th century. Its story stretches all the way back to 1135, when King Louis VI decided Paris needed a proper public market.
The chosen spot was a marshy field just outside the medieval city walls. Over the centuries, the market grew, with new buildings springing up to house everything from fishmongers to cloth merchants.
By the time Baltard arrived, Les Halles had already been the city’s market for more than 700 years.
The End of an Era
In the 20th century the market’s success became its downfall. The streets around Les Halles were choked with delivery trucks and shoppers. The city had outgrown its beloved “belly.” In the late 1960s, officials made the controversial decision to move the wholesale market out to Rungis, on the city’s edge.
What happened next broke many Parisian hearts. Despite protests, petitions, and international outcry, the Baltard pavilions were demolished in 1971.
Only one pavilion was saved-number 8, the egg and poultry hall-which was painstakingly moved to Nogent-sur-Marne, where it lives on as a cultural space.
In their place rose the Forum des Halles, a sprawling underground shopping mall and transit hub. For many, it was like ripping the soul out of Paris, and for years the site was known as “the hole in the middle of Paris.”
And that is where we come back to me — the Stripper. A job title that made a great conversation starter.
A stripper in offset printing was the worker who arranged and joined film negatives on a light table to create the correct layout for printing plates. This involved precisely aligning each negative, and ensuring that pages or images would appear in the right sequence and position when printed, folded, and trimmed
In essence, I was working in a now obsolete job.
I learned the trade in a 2-year program. While I can operate a printing press and set type — in a dinosurish sort of fashion — my specialty was camera, color separation, and negative composition.
One time we were tasked to lay out an 8-page booklet with pictures. The layout incorporated every complication we would encounter in real life with overlapping images.
And I needed pictures.
At the time I was still receiving Camera Magazine every month.
And that is where I first came across “Les Halles.” I was fascinated by the stark black and white photography.
Camera magazine was a highly influential photography publication that ran from 1922 to 1981, originally founded in Switzerland.
Over the decades it gained international acclaim for its elegant design, high-quality printing, and dedication to both fine art and documentary photography.
Its trilingual format (English, French, and German) made it accessible to readers worldwide.
Sadly, I gave away my whole collection of Camera Magazine. The pictures you see here I had to pull off the internet.
