La Villette

You are approaching a site that once held a much more somber purpose than the greenery and music you see today. Before it became a public park, this area was known as the City of Blood. From eighteen sixty-seven until nineteen seventy-four, it functioned as the largest industrial slaughterhouse complex in the world. Trains delivered thousands of animals daily to this facility, which stood as a massive, rationalized machine for the production of meat. At the peak of its operation around the turn of the twentieth century, workers here processed over twenty thousand sheep and five thousand oxen every single day.