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Heritage classified

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Origin and history

The building at 71 Grand-Pont Street in Rouen is a 16th-century civil building, classified as historical monuments in 1922. It is distinguished by its facades (outside the ground floor) and roofs, protected for their architectural value. This building illustrates the Renaissance heritage of Rouen, a city that was booming commercially and culturally, marked by its role as a regional capital in Normandy.

Grand-Pont Street, where this building stands, follows the path of the cardo maximus de la Rouen antique. It owes its name to an ancient stone bridge built in the 12th century under Mathilde IEmperesse. Over the centuries, this shopping artery has concentrated on various activities, including theatres, shops (such as the Nouvelles Galeries, Art Nouveau style), and places frequented by cultural figures (Marcel Duchamp, Simone de Beauvoir). The 16th century building, destroyed in 1940 during the bombings, embodied this mixture of medieval and modern history.

The Second World War profoundly marked Grand-Pont Street: the classified building was razed in June 1940, as much of the neighborhood. His disappearance was part of the vast destruction suffered by Rouen, followed by a post-war reconstruction (1950–51) entrusted to architects such as Paul Koch or Georges Feray. Today, only its 1922 ranking attests to its past existence, while the street preserves traces of its centuries-old history, between medieval heritage and modernity.

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