Édouard André Municipal Park (), also known as the City Park (, ), is a public urban park in Luxembourg City, in southern Luxembourg. Located in the Ville Haute district, it forms a green belt around the west and north of the historic city centre. The park is traversed by Avenue Monterey, Avenue Émile Reuter and Avenue de la Porte Neuve, separating it into four distinct sections, and has a total area of , making it the largest of Luxembourg City's 15 parks.
The park's history goes back to the 1867 Treaty of London, which imposed the perpetual neutrality of Luxembourg and the dismantling of the city's vast fortifications. In 1871, French landscape architect Édouard André, known for his work on the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris, was invited to design the new park, which he did in an English landscape garden style, benefitting from the uneven terrain left by the fortifications. The park was completed between 1872 and 1878, and its terrain perpetually ceded to the city of Luxembourg in 1875. Contemporary accounts suggest the park's early years were marked by a certain neglect, but by the turn of the century, it became a popular gathering place, thanks in part to the presence of two restaurants. From 1904 to 1954, the park was directly served by the Luxembourg-Parc station on the Luxembourg-Echternach narrow gauge railway line.
Two of the main points of interest in the park are the Villa Vauban, built in 1873 and expanded in 2010, which serves as the city's art museum, and the Villa Louvigny, which as the home of broadcaster RTL from 1931 to the 1990s, hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in 1962 and 1966. It also features a number of sculptures and memorials, most notably a statue of Princess Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach that was inaugurated in 1876, making it the first public monument in Luxembourg, and busts of Victor Hugo and Mahatma Gandhi. As of 2022, the park's flora was made up of 1,299 trees, some of which have been labelled as "remarkable trees", including a giant sequoia flanking the Princess Amalia statue, and a horse chestnut planted in 1921 to commemorate the birth of the future Grand Duke Jean.
Description
Édouard André Municipal Park is located in the Ville Haute district, in central Luxembourg City. It forms a green belt that bounds the historic city centre to its west and north, and is bordered by Avenue Marie-Thérèse to the south, Boulevard Prince Henri to the east, and the Côte d'Eich to the north-east. The total area of the park is around , making it the largest of the city's 15 parks.
The park is sectioned by avenues that radiate out of the city centre, splitting it into four sections; from south to north, these are the Edmond Klein section, between Avenue Marie-Thérèse and Avenue Monterey, the Parc Louvigny section, between Avenue Monterey and Avenue Émile Reuter, the Parc Supérieur section, between Avenue Émile Reuter and Avenue de la Porte Neuve, and the Pescatore section, between Avenue de la Porte Neuve and the Côte d'Eich.
The largest lawn in the park is the Kinnekswiss ("king's meadow"), in the Parc Supérieur section, which is known as a popular meeting place.
History Treaty of London and Fuchs plan
From the 16th century to 1867, Luxembourg was a fortified city; the Fortress of Luxembourg, known as the "Gibraltar of the North" due to its reputed impregnability, was expanded over the centuries under various occupying forces, most notably by Vauban, Louis XIV's military engineer, from 1684 onwards. By 1867, defence works covered , while the city itself occupied an area of just ; permanent constructions were forbidden in a nearly radius around the fortress. In the times of the fortress, green space in the city was exclusively private and shielded from public view, its enjoyment largely reserved to wealthy citizens or religious communities. Despite the growing interest of the city's bourgeoisie in public space designed for recreation, notably inspired by the vast promenades and parks created in Paris under Baron Haussmann, it would take until 1867 for similar advances to take place in Luxembourg City.
On 11 May of that year, the Treaty of London was signed, ordering the perpetual neutrality of Luxembourg, the dismantling of the fortress and the departure of the Prussian garrison that occupied it. While this would allow Luxembourg to become an "open city", expanding beyond its former walls, it also rid it of its military importance, forcing it to find a new identity and purpose. Ideas of founding a university or developing the city into an industrial town were considered, but were abandoned in favour of establishing the city as a decision-making centre and prominent interconnected marketplace. In July 1867, Belgian landscape architect , who had worked on the urbanism of Mons, was tasked by the Luxembourgish government with establishing a plan for the transformation of the fortifications' terrain, which had become state property.
Fuchs's plan, presented in early 1868, foresaw the creation of four (lit. 'pierce-throughs'), straight avenues that would radiate out of the city centre to link it to existing roads and strengthen its connection to international markets. Completed by 1870, these would become the Avenue Marie-Thérèse, Avenue Monterey, Avenue de l'Arsenal (renamed Avenue Émile Reuter in 1974) and Avenue de la Porte-Neuve. To facilitate the demolition of as many defence works as possible, the avenues would be linked together by belt-like residential boulevards. Fuchs proposed the creation of a public park in the space between the two former defence lines; in the times of the fortress, this was already the site of a promenade lined with elm trees, known as the ('general's garden'), which was open to the public at limited hours and for a fee. In 1871, a project to create a railway station within the park's boundaries was briefly considered; for this reason, later versions of the Fuchs plan gave the park only half of its originally planned size.
Planning under André
Paul de Scherff, an advisor to prime minister Emmanuel Servais, successfully pushed for French landscape architect Édouard André to be invited in to design the new park. Aged 31 at the time, André already enjoyed a solid international reputation for his work on parks and gardens, having notably worked on the design of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris, which, being laid out over a former gypsum quarry, presented similarities to the deep, difficultly constructible ditches left over by the fortifications. The Buttes Chaumont had been inaugurated as part of the 1867 Paris Exposition, where André met , the Luxembourgish commissionner at the exposition, who introduced him to De Scherff. André came to Luxembourg City in early 1871 to visit the site of the park; by this time, the dismantling of the fortress was well underway, with most forts demolished. Four enclaves of terrain totalling within the future park, three of which corresponded to the ruins of reduits Marie, Vauban and Louvigny, had been auctioned off for the construction of villas. André was simultaneously solicitated by Dutreux and De Scherff for the creation of the gardens of the new Fondation Pescatore care home, of which they were trustees; these gardens would become englobed with the rest of the park.
André presented his plan for the park, drawn up without any consultation with city authorities, in May 1871; six versions in total were successively made until the approval of a definitive plan in 1873. Described by historian as having "enormous power" and being "authoritarian in character", he ignored many of Fuchs's considerations, largely disregarding all those that had not yet been implemented. André regretted the sale of terrain within the park, stopping any further sales and placing strict limitations on the construction of villas on terrain already sold; furthermore, he viewed the Boulevard Prince Henri as "sad and boring". Considering the narrowness of the park envisioned in the later versions of the Fuchs plan to be "a serious shortcoming", he eliminated a boulevard planned on its western side, thus doubling the park's size. Beyond its purpose as a 'lung' for the city, the park's creation would serve to limit the quantity of newly available land, and thus hinder the decline in value of real estate in the city; furthermore, the park would serve as a transitional space between the city and countryside, and a boundary between the city's centre and its outer, more working-class neighbourhoods.
André's vision for the park was that of a green belt or "green crown" around the city centre, a concept that was recent at the time, being experimented in the United States and a few European cities. Each section of the park, as delinated by the new avenues, would function as a self-contained, closed-circuit entity, linked to the rest of the park by peripheral alleyways. The existing elm-lined alleyway, referred to by André as "the Luxembourgish people's favourite promenade", would be maintained; some of the elms were said to still be standing as of 1950. The ditches left by the fortifications were only partially filled in, as André, adhering to the model of the English landscape garden and the idea of gardens being "inspired by the compositions of the great landscape painters", designed the park to function as "a long, undulating vista". The roundness of the park's alleyways was softened in later versions of the plan, but they remained curved, espousing the contours of former bastions. Tree groves would be densely planted, forming a green barrier that largely excluded the rest of the city from parkgoers' field of vision. Park entrances were heavily inspired by André's own work at Sefton Park, Liverpool, and that of his friend Frederick Law Olmsted at Central Park. Finally, lawns would provide air and light, with the Kinnekswiss being the only large opening in the park. The city government's proposal to create a large basin and fountain on the Kinnekswiss - a design feature strictly associated with French landscape gardens - was strongly opposed by André, who derided it as "an atrocity utterly unworthy of the enlightened people who lead your Government and your city".
Creation and early years
The first planting in the park took place in the winter of 1872-73; nearly 1,400 trees were planted, mostly maple, chestnut and privet, all sourced from nurseries in Metz. Planting continued until 1878, with the date of the park's completion being considered as 10 July 1878. Through a convention signed on 30 January 1875, the Luxembourgish state passed ownership of the park onto the City, "to serve as a public promenade". A law of 1 March of that same year confirmed this transfer, specifying that the City was "never, either temporarily or permanently, to dispose of the park, or parts thereof, or divert it from its intended purpose".
The southernmost section of the park, between Avenue Marie-Thérèse and Avenue Monterey, was designated by the government as a botanical garden, a project initiated in 1868 and spearheaded by André. It aimed to exclusively showcase flora native to Luxembourg, in order to both teach natural sciences to students from city schools and foster a sense of national identity by making Luxembourgers identify more with their land. Popularly known as the ("doll cemetary") due to the appearance of its many tiny, individually labelled patches of soil, it suffered from a lack of maintenance from the city, and the project ended in 1888. A playground was later built there, and in 1948, the section was named in honour of Luxembourgish biologist .