La Villette

Parc de la Villette covers fifty-five hectares of northeast Paris, marked by bright red steel structures called follies scattered across the grass. Before these gardens arrived in the nineteen eighties, the site housed the city's primary slaughterhouses and the national livestock market. Thousands of cattle arrived here by rail every week to be processed for the city's butchers. Architects replaced the industrial kill floors with concert venues, science museums, and wide lawns, turning a place of blood into an urban park.