Parc de Bercy

The ground you are walking on was once the world's largest wine and spirits warehouse district. In the nineteenth century, this area functioned as a massive, self-contained city of trade, strategically positioned outside the Paris tax boundaries to keep wine costs low for the city. Merchants brought barrels up the Seine on barges, and a private network of railway tracks and cobbled streets crisscrossed the site to facilitate the massive movement of alcohol. The warehouses were so expansive and profitable that the district operated like a private village, restricted to winemakers and laborers, until it eventually succumbed to modern transport methods and fell into decades of abandonment.