History
The first Gare du Nord was built by Bridge and Roadway Engineers on behalf of the Chemin de Fer du Nord company, which was managed by Léonce Reynaud, professor of architecture at the École Polytechnique. The station was inaugurated on 14 June 1846, the same year as the launch of the Paris–Amiens–Lille rail link. Since the station was found to be too small in size, it was partially demolished in 1860 to provide space for the current station. The original station's façade was removed and transferred to Lille.
The chairman of the Chemin de Fer du Nord railway company, James Mayer de Rothschild, chose the French architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff to design the current station. Construction lasted from May 1861 to December 1865, but the new station opened for service while still under construction in 1864. The façade was designed around a triumphal arch and used many slabs of stone. The building has the usual U-shape of a terminus station. The main support beam is made out of cast iron. The support pillars inside the station were made at Alston & Gourley's ironworks in Glasgow in the United Kingdom, the only country with a foundry large enough for the task.
The sculptural display represents the principal cities served by the company. Eight of the nine most majestic statues, crowning the building along the cornice line, illustrate destinations outside France, with the ninth figure of Paris in the center. Fourteen more modest statues representing northern French cities are lower on the facade. The sculptors represented are:
- London and Vienna by Jean-Louis Jaley
- Brussels and Warsaw by François Jouffroy
- Amsterdam by Charles Gumery
- Frankfurt by Gabriel Thomas
- Berlin by Jean-Joseph Perraud
- Cologne by Mathurin Moreau
- Paris, Boulogne and Compiegne by Pierre-Jules Cavelier
- Arras and Laon by Théodore-Charles Gruyère
- Lille and Beauvais by Charles-François Lebœuf
- Valenciennes and Calais by Philippe Joseph Henri Lemaire
- Rouen and Amiens by Eugène-Louis Lequesne
- Douai and Dunkirk by Gustave Crauck
- Cambrai and Saint-Quentin by Auguste Ottin
In 1927 an American multi-millionairess named Alice de Janzé shot herself and her British lover, Raymund de Trafford, on board a train at the Gare du Nord. The two survived their injuries.
Read more about this topic: Gare Du Nord
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I believe my ardour for invention springs from his loins. I can’t say that the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it.”
—Caresse Crosby (1892–1970)