Brussels Stock Exchange

The Brussels Stock Exchange is easy to recognize by its monumental entrance, where a broad staircase flanked by sculpted lions rises to a portico of six massive Corinthian columns. Completed in eighteen seventy-three, this eclectic building was designed by architect Léon-Pierre Suys to serve as the financial engine of a rapidly modernizing city. It was built over the site of an old Butter Market, which itself sat atop the ruins of a thirteenth-century Franciscan convent.