Les Entrepots de Bercy (Paris)

Casks in the Entrepôts de Bercy (Paris, 12th)Les Entrepots de Bercy, Paris wine district (12th arrondissement) in the late 1980s'
You can't believe you're in Paris, do you ? Along the seedy streets and provincial-looking buildings of this part of the 12th arrondissement, millions on tons of wine have transited through over the last couple of centuries...
Many of you probably already visited the new Quartier de Bercy in Paris (Pdf document in French with maps and history), a mix of residential buildings, parks, restaurants, fancy bars and shops, even a multiplex cinema, most of them around the Cour-Saint-Emilion pedestrian street. As fun as the place can be, especially on a summer evening, it is mostly an empty shell compared from the huge gated wine district on the ruins of which this new neighborhood was built.
Here are a few pictures selected from many more pictures that I shot in the entrepots de Bercy in the late 1980's before they were levelled somewhere near 1993 to make place to the modern quartier de Bercy.The original quality of my slides is not fully rendered by my home scanner but it's enough to have an idea of how the place looked like then.
Until well into the 1960's, the Entrepots de Bercy were a bustling professional neighborhood, a gated enclave entirely devoted to wine and spirits where Nécociants, coopers, bottlers, label printers and cork dealers, among others, runned their business and helped supply the then-still-huge demand for wine by Parisians.