Centrul Civic

However, neither of these events changed the face of the city more than the Ceaușescan "redevelopment schemes" of the 1980s, under which an overall area of 5.9 square kilometres (2.3 sq mi) of the historic center of Bucharest was affected,[2] including monasteries, churches, synagogues, a hospital, and a noted Art Deco sports stadium (Stadionul Republicii).

This also involved evicting 40,000 people after a single day's notice and relocating them to new homes, in order to make way for the grandiose Centrul Civic and the House of the Republic, now officially renamed as the Palace of the Parliament.

The vast empty fields which emerged in the historic town during the demolitions of the 1980s were sarcastically called "Ceaușima" (a portmanteau of Ceaușescu and Hiroshima).

A remainder of the former "Ceaușima" is the never-completed eastern large area between the Mircea Vodă Boulevard and Nerva Traian Street (10.7 hectares (26 acres)), where in 1989 had begun the construction of the National Centre for Creation and Culture, named after Cântarea României, an ensemble that would include seven performance halls, the first six with capacities between 550 and 2,100 seats, and the seventh, dedicated to the National Opera, of 3,100 seats.

Being renamed, after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, in Bulevardul Unirii (the Union Boulevard), it has been modeled after Paris's Champs-Élysées, though a little wider; it runs roughly east–west, making a grand approach to the Palace of the Parliament at its western terminus.