Halle Gate

This guide to Halle Gate in Brussels opens with a demolition crew working through the city's old medieval wall in the eighteen twenties, tearing down gate after gate while one, built in the thirteen eighties, kept dodging the wrecking crews as a prison, a customs house and a church. It follows Belgium's newly independent government deciding to preserve its one surviving gate, and the awkward problem of a monument that looked more like a battered stump than a landmark. Along the way it names each of the gate's practical past lives, from grain store to Lutheran church.