Memorial · 1929
Gare du Nord
Address · 18, rue de Dunkerque, 75010 Paris
Metro · Gare du Nord (4, 5)
Today · In operation. Station in operation.
The story
The Gare du Nord replaced the Embarcadère de Belgique, opened in 1846 by Léonce Reynaud for the Creil line. Having become too small, this first building was dismantled and re-erected in Lille, where it forms the present Lille-Flandres station. The Compagnie des chemins de fer du Nord, chaired by James de Rothschild, commissioned a new station in 1857, whose design Jacques-Ignace Hittorff took over in 1861. Opened in 1864 and completed in 1865, it combines a train shed of cast iron, iron and glass some 200 metres long with a neoclassical façade of nearly 180 metres, crowned by 23 allegorical statues of cities, with the figure of Paris, by Pierre-Jules Cavelier, at the top.
It is the station for trains to Belgium, and it was here that Crowley's Parisian stay came to an end. After two days of uproar in the press, begun on 16 April 1929 by a Paris-Midi article accusing him of having served Germany during the war, Crowley spent the day of the 16th with reporters and photographers. The next morning, 17 April, he left for Brussels. According to Paris-Midi of 18 April, he took the 11:30 a.m. train at the Gare du Nord, closely watched by the Sûreté Générale, and told the journalist on the platform that he was leaving because he was forced to, but that he would return to learn the charges against him and to clear his name. He said he was going to Brussels to fetch his fiancée, Maria de Miramar, and his secretary Regardie, and accused his former associate Carl de Vidal Hunt of having fed the press.
The other sources differ on the details: the Crowley Timeline speaks of a 10 a.m. train, and the Manchester Guardian writes that he was escorted to the Franco-Belgian border. That same evening Crowley was registered at the Hôtel Métropole in Brussels, room 459. News of the “expulsion” went round the American and British newspapers.
The station is now a listed historic monument and ranks among the busiest in Europe. Hittorff's façade, its statues of cities and the great train shed remain visible from place Napoléon-III and rue de Dunkerque; the canopy added later in front of the façade hides part of the porticoes.