Northern Stations
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Northern Stations
The life of the 10e is coloured by the presence of the big northern stations. Most travelers scarcely give them a glance, intent on burying off to more salubrious parts of the city, but the station buildings are in fact very beautiful, closer to Classical orangeries in style than icons of the industrial age. The Gare du Nord (serving all places north, including the high speed train lines to Germany and London) was built by the architect Hittorff in the early 1860s, and is aggressively dominated by its three giant arches, crowned by eight statues representing the original terminus towns, from Amsterdam and Berlin to Vienna and Warsaw. Facing the boulevard de Strasbourg, the slightly earlier Gare de l’Est (serving northeastern and eastern France and Eastern Europe) is more delicate, though when its central arch was open the elements, as it was when originally built, the steam and smoke billowing out would have had a powerful effect.
The area around the stations is mostly gritty and unappealing, the major traffic thoroughfares of boulevard de Magenta and boulevard de Strasbourg both noisy and dull. Beside the Gare de l’Est, however, a high wall encloses the gardens of square Villemin (entrance on rue des Récollets and avenue de Verdum), which provides a welcome haven in this otherwise unrelievedly stony quarter of the city. The garden once belonged to the Couvent des Récollets, one much-restored, seventeenth-century wing of which still stands on the rue du Fauburg-St-Martin. After stints as a hospital and an architectures school, this former convent has now become a centre for cultural exchanges, housing artists and researchers working in Paris. Further east again, the Canal St-Martin (covered in the section on Eastern Paris) is an even more tranquil place to escape the city hustle. Just south of the Gare de l’Est the church of St-Laurent has a handsome choir dating from the fifteenth century. Thanks to Haussmann, who thought its original façade irritatingly off-centre, the church’s Gothic-looking west front actually dates from the same era as the Gare du Nord.
