NarrativeThe Parisian disco club had its heyday in the 1980s, when teenagers came to dance there on rollerblades. Since its closure in 2003, it had again become a squatted and abandoned concrete basement. At the end of a vast construction site, the place should house concert halls, offices and recording studios.
A gutted red seat. An old mattress. Three black stools with their feet up. A fringed curtain. A piece of stucco decor signed Philippe Starck. Bags stuffed with rubble… This Friday morning in April, the waste accumulates on the median in the middle of the Porte de Champerret, in Paris. Direction, dumpster. The boss in charge of the site is delighted: “From below, we have already brought up tons and tons of dirt. We see the end of it. »
A few more weeks of cleaning, a few months of work, and it will definitely be over for La Main Jaune, one of the most legendary discotheques in France, which has once again become an ordinary concrete basement before starting a new life.
Farewell, the cave of The party, the one where the young Vic (Sophie Marceau) in mini-shorts kissed her father, played by Claude Brasseur, on the mouth to make her boyfriend jealous. Erased, the 1980s.
No trace of the slide
This morning, not everything has yet disappeared. At the foot of the piled up rubbish, a door hidden in a curious pseudo-Aztec statue leads to a staircase with dark walls scratched with handprints. Yellow, of course. A few steps down, the old nightclub can be guessed at by the light of the site lamps. The walls are always covered with mirrors. The pillars, dressed in rhinestones. A very large long room, the floor a red color faded by years of dust. All around, yellow metal railings. They helped dancers hold onto their roller skates.
The bar still sits enthroned, with its huge Coca-Cola bottle stuck to the side. The hot dog was 15 francs. Further on, we guess the old entrance, then the cloakroom. At the far end, a cardboard grotto is falling to shreds. A fake rock painted blue holds up a bit better. No trace, on the other hand, of the toboggan by which the teenagers, once put on, slid from the ground floor to the dance floor.
Not sure that all these remains are original. After its closure in 2003, La Main Jaune did not remain an inviolate sarcophagus for long. A collective of artists quietly took up residence there for two years, in 2011-2012. “It was an incredible place, a kind of giant disco ball, where everything seemed possible, entrust Alice and Anaïs, two of the leaders of the collective, who prefer to remain anonymous. Six or seven shows were created there combining circus, theater and dance, sometimes with a little skating to recall the history of the site. »
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