The brilliant purple windmill of the Moulin Rouge has been an omnipresent marker atop the famed cabaret venue for greater than a century.
However on Thursday, Parisians woke as much as an alarming sight: the blades of the windmill bent and mendacity on the bottom after they broke off and fell in a single day.
Footage circulating in native information media on Thursday confirmed the blades tangled on the bottom in entrance of the constructing. Three letters of the brilliant “Moulin Rouge” signal additionally appeared to have fallen.
Firefighters had been known as to the world after 2 a.m., a spokeswoman for the Paris Hearth Brigade stated, and examined the construction to ensure nothing else was threatening to fall. With the zone safe and no person injured, the firefighters shortly left. Employees had been cleaning up the debris Thursday morning.
A spokeswoman for the Moulin Rouge stated through textual content messages that collapse had been attributable to a “mechanical drawback,” and confirmed that no person had been injured. It was the primary time within the venue’s historical past that such an accident had taken place, she stated.
The Moulin Rouge is about to have a good time its one hundred and thirty fifth anniversary this 12 months. It constructed a fame for internet hosting whirlwind nights and lavish reveals, and its dancers performed a paramount position in bringing the frenzied model of the fashionable cancan dance to the mainstream. In recent times, it has sought to draw a youthful crowd, and opened a rooftop bar close to the windmill blades.
It has seen injury earlier than: A hearth ravaged the venue in 1915, and it didn’t reopen till almost a decade later.
The blades could be “repaired in a short time,” the Moulin Rouge spokeswoman stated. It was not recognized on Thursday precisely what mechanical drawback had induced the blades to interrupt off.
An exterior firm checks the windmill each two months, she stated, and had final examined the blades in February.
However enterprise on the cabaret, which runs two reveals a day, would go on as common.
“The Moulin Rouge stays open,” she stated.
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.
