The exhibition maps the transformation of Brussels into a modern city

Brussels - The emerging monumental Palace of Justice, whose future size is indicated only by the raised scaffolding, the Senne River calmly winding through the center of Brussels, or the unfinished stock exchange building that replaced the agricultural market. These are the views that have been preserved only thanks to unique photographs over a century old. These days, visitors to the Brussels cultural center Halles Saint-Géry can remember them.
    About sixty of the probably oldest preserved photographs of Brussels remind us of the European metropolis as it appeared between 1850 and 1880, a time when it began its transformation into a modern city with wide boulevards and grand palaces. This transformation claimed many corners, houses, entire blocks, and neighborhoods whose origins date back to the medieval era.
    For example, the Senne River was hidden in the 19th century into a canal running beneath the center of Brussels, the Palace of Justice grew to such dimensions that it is considered by some guides to be one of the largest buildings constructed in the 19th century, and at the site of the market, there has long been trading in securities instead of milk, eggs, and other products from small farms.
    The photographs, featuring people posing in tailcoats with splendid hats and top hats on their heads, come from the collections of Brussels institutions and archives. The faded, brownish photographs have an almost artistic impression. However, as the exhibition organizers point out, the reasons for their creation were much more prosaic.
    "Some were used, for example, for land registry purposes. They were considered short-term, temporary documents," quoted one of the exhibition's authors, Steven Joseph, by the weekly The Flanders Today. The Halles Saint-Géry center focuses precisely on the transformations of Brussels in the past, not only in the second half of the 19th century.
    The reconstruction of Brussels did not stop even after World War II, when many Art Nouveau houses and blocks gave way to the ever-expanding modern development, especially due to the growing European Union institutions. The residents of Brussels did not hesitate to demolish a number of Art Nouveau neighborhoods and houses, including those designed by their probably most famous architect and leading figure of Art Nouveau, Victor Horta.
    Interested parties in the history of Brussels can also see large-format photographs in the exhibition that offer nearly identical views of some places decades ago compared to their state in 2007. And they can find many radical changes in them.
    Thanks to a computer program, they can view a black-and-white aerial map of Brussels depicting the city in the first half of the 1950s and compare it with an identical, now color aerial view from last year. With some surprise, they will discover that, for example, at the site of today's main seat of the European Commission, the Berlaymont Palace, there was a romantic park with a tennis court half a century ago, and that the current seat of the EU Council stands where one of the now non-existent streets led from the round Schuman Square.