This time it's the right one.
After years of hesitation, aborted announcements, paralysis and procrastination, the Sulzer hall in Mantes-la-Ville (Yvelines) will finally be renovated.
Local elected officials have just launched renovation work on this old industrial building, destroyed by a fire in 2003.
Abandoned to its fate for twenty years, the hall had been the subject of numerous reconversion announcements: in 2015, the developer Hammerson even imagined transforming it into a giant shopping center... before suddenly disappearing.
The Sulzer Hall rehabilitation project includes three distinct parts.
LP/Mehdi GHerdane
The building, recognizable by its steel structure 300 meters long and 30 meters high which served in particular since the 1950s as a production site for industrial pumps for the Sulzer group, will be split into three sections.
Part of it will house students from the Mantois university center, specializing in new technologies.
Another will be devoted to cultural activities whose exact nature is not yet known.
In its center, the steel building will house shops and services.
Two new lanes will be created to allow traffic in the heart of the “vault”.
The work is expected to last two years.
A symbol of a changing industrial territory
For residents, the project will mark the disappearance of an almost abandoned wasteland, open to the four winds and eaten away by weeds.
As a witness to this rebirth, the Paris 2024 Olympic flame will pass through this “secular monument” on July 23.
Beyond the symbol, the transformation of the hall should not be read in isolation.
The building, a vestige of the region's industrial past, is part of a district launched around fifteen years ago and called "Mantes-Université".
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Vast of almost 47 hectares, this complex of thousands of homes and businesses is itself structured around the Mantes-la-Jolie station, which is due to accommodate the RER E in 2026. As construction progresses, “Mantes-U” has become the incarnation of the sociological evolution of a Mantois in profound change, where services have replaced industry, where residents from the inner suburbs have settled, rubbing shoulders with the emerging middle class.
Local political tensions slowed down the project
The launch of this project also marks the end of local political bickering.
Since the fire of 2003, elected officials had never managed to work together on this project.
The arrival of mayor (RN) Cyril Nauth in Mantes-la-Ville in 2014 and the severance of political relations decided by the Yvelines departmental council, had paralyzed the project.
We had to wait for an alignment of the planets for it to come back to life: the departmental council, the towns of Buchelay and Mantes-la-Ville as well as Epamsa, the public organization which pilots the Mantes-University project, succeeded to agree to conclude this project estimated at 5.8 million euros.