The four windmill blades at the famous Moulin Rouge, a 134-year-old Parisian cabaret club in Paris, fell off early Thursday morning. No one was injured.
The blades and part of the club’s electric sign fell to the ground at around 2 a.m. local time, after the audience for the last performance of the night had left, said the club’s general manager, Jean-Victor Clerico, according to Reuters.
An unspecified technical problem caused the full set of blades to fall, and there is no foul play suspected, Mr. Clerico told French wire agency Agence France-Presse.
“Moulin Rouge” (“red mill” in French) opened in 1889 and will be turning 135 in October.
Locals were shocked to see the damage.
“Paris without its mill is like Paris without its Eiffel Tower. It’s still very strange, there was no storm last night, I hope that we will quickly find out what happened and that cameras were able to capture the scene,” 50-year resident of the neighborhood and former Moulin Rouge head waiter Andre Duval told the Le Parisien newspaper, as translated by Google.
Despite the display malfunction, the show must go on. On X on Thursday, the Moulin Rouge wrote, “We are open this evening, to continue to bring the spirit of the Parisian party to life.”
In addition to being a symbol of the cultural life of fin-de-siecle Paris, the Moulin Rouge was also made famous by the 2001 Baz Luhrmann movie musical “Moulin Rouge!” starring Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman.
