Forum des Halles

Les Halles, the city’s main wholesale food market, occupied the area just south of the Église St-Eustache from the early 12th century until 1969, when it was moved to the southern suburb of Rungis. In its place, the unspeakably ugly Forum des Halles, a huge underground shopping centre, was constructed in the glass-and-chrome style of the early 1970s. At last it’s slated to be gutted and rebuilt by 2012, and topped with an architecturally stunning ‘canopy’.

Atop the Forum des Halles is a popular rooftop garden. During the warmer months, street musicians, fire-eaters and other performers display their talents throughout the area, especially at place du Jean du Bellay, whose centre is adorned by a multitiered Renaissance fountain, the Fontaine des Innocents, erected in 1549. It is named after the Cimetière des Innocents, a cemetery on this site from which two million skeletons were disinterred and transferred to the Catacombes in the 14e after the Revolution.