Marché des Douves de Bordeaux

This guide to Marche des Douves de Bordeaux follows a covered market that spent its final decades counting down: 124 merchants in 1939, 69 by 1950, and the last 22 stalls closing in 1975. It traces the decades afterward when the cast-iron hall stored municipal bicycles and slowly rusted, saved from demolition mostly by luck, until a newspaper writer publicly dared the city to find it a use. Look up at the ironwork overhead, every rivet original to the market's first life.