Exterior of the South hall of the resurrected Iron Market in Port-au-Prince (all photos by Mac McKinney unless otherwise noted)
I left everyone off at the entranceway to the South hall of Haiti's resurrected Iron Market in Part Seven, before switching topics in Part Eight to the Truttier Waste Dump. Now I am finally completing our tour of the Iron Market by gazing upward at the fascinating architecture of the South hall, not any different than that of the North hall, mind you, but our focus was on artistry in that article. The South hall stalls, meanwhile, are leased to everyday merchants selling everything, while the North hall was devoted to art and artifacts. The Market had already closed for the day, so the stools were up, the merchandise mostly covered, the merchants gone, and only a few workers, contractors and security guards were still about. In fact here are some of them now, as we wander inside the South hall:
Stools up, merchandise stowed, I am staring down what of the Market aisles:
Closeup:
And this is a closeup of a Digicel Gazebo corner inside the hall:
The man who spearheaded rebuilding the Iron Market, Denis O'Brien, owns Digicel. Red and white are Digicel's signature colors:
A long view of the interior, looking South.
Looking up at the very ornate interior superstructure:
Zooming in on the columns and one of the ornate overhead fans:
Closup of a fan:
Looking straight up at the trussed A-Frame corrugated roof, above which on the outside sit scores of solar energy panels that absorb the sunlight that will power the Iron Market:
What the topside on the roof looks like:
(photo by Dennis Mee)
Back inside, looking West:
Portion of the A-frame roof:
Closeup: The ornate, abstract floral swirls we see in the brackets are evocative of both French and Arabian designs, quite apt in a country that was formerly a French colony in a building that was originally designed in the 19th Century for Cairo:
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