L'Opéra Garnier

L'Opéra Garnier

The Palais Garnier began construction in August 1861 and was completed January 5, 1875. It took 14 years to complete this building and it was commissioned by Emporer Napoloen III and the architect that helped build this building is Charles Garnier. The reason it took so long to finish this was because of a variety of interruptions. First they had found an underground lake, the 1870 war, and the fall of the empire. The reason for building this structure was because at the time Napoloen III had been carrying out a big Parisian reconstruction project so it was part of the project. The building itself is 88 meters in height and 70.2 meters wide. Some unusual facts about the Palais Garnier is that it's surrounded by banks. But only because at a much older time when people left their jewelry in the banks and took them out to wear when going to the Palais Garnier. Another somewhat unusual fact is that the top tier of the Palais Garnier is called the "chicken coup". It's called that because it was mostly the middle class who sat there to watch upper class citizens. But when they saw someone they didn't like they'd throw rotten food at them. So to prevent the food from hitting the people they put chicken wire to catch the food before it hit anyone. A famous person connected to this site is Andrew Lloyd who wrote The Phantom of the Opera which is based off of this building.