La City Arts De La Rue

This guide to La City Arts de la Rue in Marseille traces the site's life as a Marseille soap factory, founded in 1730 by Jean-Baptiste Court and later known as L'Abeille, before the rise of the washing machine gutted the trade through the 1970s. It follows how street artists squatted the abandoned workshops in the 1990s until the city formalized the Cité des Arts de la Rue in 2013. Look at the giant carved bar of soap greeting you by the ticket booth, a joke built on the same fortune that once ran this ground.