Camus de Mézières, was built between 1763 and 1769 at the west end of Les Halles. Its circular central court was later covered with a dome, and it was converted into the Bourse de Commerce in 1889. In the 1850s, Victor Baltard designed the famous glass and iron structure which would house les Halles for over a century and became one of the sights of Paris; this would last until the 1970s. Now entirely a food market, the remodeled market was known as the "Belly of Paris", as Émile Zola called it in his novel Le Ventre de Paris, which is set in the busy marketplace of the 19th century. Major conversion Unable to compete in the new market economy and in need of massive repairs, the colourful ambience once associated with the bustling area of merchant stalls disappeared in 1973, when Les Halles was demolished (fruit, flower and vegetable markets had moved in 1969, and only the butchers at the meat markets remained); the wholesale market was relocated to the suburb of Rungis. Two of the glass and cast iron market pavilions were dismantled and re-erected elsewhere; one in the Paris suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne, the other in Yokohama, Japan, and the rest were destroyed. The site was to become the point of convergence of the RER, a network of new express underground lines which was completed in the 1960s. Three lines leading out of the city to the south, east and west were to be extended and connected in a new underground station. For several years, the site of the markets was an enormous open pit, nicknamed ( means 'hole'), regarded as an eyesore at the foot of the historic church of Saint-Eustache. Construction was completed in 1977 on Châtelet–Les-Halles, Paris's new urban railway hub. The , a partially underground multiple story commercial and shopping centre, designed by Claude Vasconi and Georges Pencreac'h, opened at the east end of the site on September 4, 1979 in presence of the Mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac, and was dubbed "the hole of Les Halles", and is considered one of the worst acts of urban vandalism in the 20th century. A public garden covering opened in 1986. Many of the surrounding streets were pedestrianized, and the park on the top of it became a magnet for drug dealing. The place been a national embarrasment ever since, and nearly universally reviled for its