Butcher

I'm not sure that this butcher shop exists any more. I tried looking for references to it on line and by looking at Google maps street view, but I couldn't find anything that looked right. I believe the shop was on the rue Montorgueil in Paris, judging by other photos in the same batch and the street pavement. But I can't find a butcher shop with this name.

A pigeon does its shopping on the rue Montorgueil. Color slide, 1992 (I think).

The street has changed a lot since I took this photo back in the early 90s. It had already changed then from days I spent here as a student a decade earlier. It has become a pedestrian street. Many of the old shops that served the former working class residents have been replaced with upscale boutiques, cafés, and restaurants. Needless to say, property values have skyrocketed as this very centrally located neighborhood became trendy and an attraction for tourists.

The catalyst for the dramatic change was the closing of the old central market halls (les halles) back in the sixties. The neighborhood was on the edge of a huge construction zone for nearly thirty years while the city rebuilt its center. The construction was still going on when I was a student. The result was less than stellar, which prompted a competition for a do-over in 2004 and another decade of construction. The new canopy over the renovated underground Forum shopping center was completed in 2016 and the surface-level park renovation is scheduled to be finished this year.