Grands Travaux de Marseille, Boulevard de l'Empereur, Percée du Fort St. Nicolas
Adolphe Terris French
To approach this seventeenth-century fort, photographer Adolphe Terris escorts us across a modern iron bridge, foregrounding an urban transformation in the making. In the 1860s, the municipal government of Marseille commissioned Terris—then the city’s leading photographer—to document a series of ambitious public works and engineering projects. Central to these plans was the construction of a new boulevard that would streamline traffic between the city’s historic and modern ports. Terris was tasked with recording the old streets and houses being demolished to make way for the thoroughfare (a project that displaced some 16,000 residents in the process). His 1864 view, produced for a larger album, finds the fort strewn with worksite rubble. But along the bridge, a neat grid of metal rail outlines the city’s new industrial image.
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