Passage du Nord & Place De Brouckère: Belle Époque Splendor

Why is it significant?

Step beneath the sculpted caryatids into the dazzling light of Passage du Nord, a glass-roofed shopping gallery built in eighteen eighty-two to link Rue Neuve with Boulevard Adolphe Max.

Key Facts

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Step beneath the sculpted caryatids into the dazzling light of Passage du Nord, a glass-roofed shopping gallery built in eighteen eighty-two to link Rue Neuve with Boulevard Adolphe Max. Designed by architect Henri Rieck, this seventy-meter arcade is an exuberant jewel of the Belle Époque, lined with thirty-two allegorical statues representing maritime trade, industry, and the fine arts.

Look up at the first-floor balconies, where graceful stone caryatids and iron corbels support a vaulted glass roof that floods the marble floor with natural daylight. In the late nineteenth century, the gallery housed high-end opticians, perfumers, and the famous Musée Castan, a sensational waxwork and curiosity cabinet that delighted bourgeois promenaders. The arcade's marble floor features intricate geometric mosaic borders, while the shopfronts retain their original curved mahogany frames, brass latches, and beveled mirror panels.

Emerge from the western portal onto Place De Brouckère, once celebrated as the Times Square of Brussels. Named after popular mayor Jules De Brouckère, this grand urban junction was famous for its glowing neon advertisements, cinematic theaters, and opulent cafes where French chansonnier Jacques Brel famously sang about the intoxicating nightlife of Brussels. Rieck designed the passage with dual neoclassical facades that harmonized with the surrounding monumental boulevards created during the major urban sanitation works led by Mayor Jules Anspach.

Anchoring the square stands the monumental Hôtel Métropole, inaugurated in eighteen ninety-four. Inside its palatial dining rooms, the legendary Solvay Conferences on Physics were held in nineteen eleven, bringing together Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Max Planck, and Ernest Rutherford to unlock the secrets of quantum physics over coffee. At Café Métropole next door, Belgian intellectuals, visiting foreign dignitaries, and surrealist artists gathered to debate literature and politics over glasses of Trappist ale and cloudy absinthe.

Walk northwest along Rue de l'Évêque and turn into Rue des Augustins toward the striking Baroque facade of Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste au Béguinage.