Why Jardin de Reuilly - Paul Pernin matters.
Jardin de Reuilly - Paul Pernin is a pastoral garden where Picpus's railway inheritance meets a sweeping central lawn, layered horticulture and one of eastern Paris's defining conversions of obsolete transport land.
Positioned between Picpus, Bercy, and Quinze-Vingts, the garden occupies a 1.52-hectare depression framed by avenue Daumesnil, Rue de Charenton, Rue Jacques-Hillairet and Rue Albinoni beneath the elevated Coulée verte René-Dumont. A gently inclined lawn covering 4,200 square meters forms the broad center of the composition. The surrounding ground breaks into smaller planted zones containing hackberries, maples, roses, heathers and other contrasting vegetation. A wooden footbridge carries the elevated pedestrian route across the lawn, preserving the longitudinal movement inherited from the former rail alignment above the garden. The result is a spacious piece of landscape architecture that converts a former transport basin into a topographically varied green room beneath one of Paris's longest linear gardens.
What defines Jardin de Reuilly - Paul Pernin.
Jardin de Reuilly - Paul Pernin is best known for transforming the former Reuilly freight station into one of the largest gardens created during the redevelopment of the old Vincennes railway corridor. The railway originated with the line connecting Bastille with communities east of Paris, inaugurated by Napoleon III in 1859 and operated from a grand terminus at place de la Bastille. Reuilly developed as an intermediate passenger and freight station on the route, giving the surrounding district direct access to the expanding nineteenth-century rail network. Passenger traffic ceased in 1969 as the eastern suburban network was reorganized around the RER, yet freight activity survived at Reuilly into the 1980s. The SNCF subsequently transferred around ten hectares of railway property to the City of Paris for the ZAC Reuilly redevelopment, opening a vast industrial tract to comprehensive reconstruction. A competition launched in 1988 selected architect Pierre Colboc to shape the garden and surrounding district, with landscape designers François-Xavier Mousquet, Philippe Thomas and Thierry Louf of Groupe Paysage contributing to the design. Construction began in 1989, and the garden emerged during the 1990s as the surrounding rail infrastructure was converted into housing, pedestrian routes and planted ground. The project preserved the old corridor as a spatial spine instead of erasing its geometry, allowing the former railway cutting and elevated alignment to determine the relationship between lawn, paths and bridge. Creation extended between 1992 and 1998, establishing the garden as a major component of the broader conversion of the Bastille-Vincennes railway lands.
The completed landscape uses elevation changes to divide a large open center from a sequence of smaller botanical environments around its perimeter. The sloping grass bowl creates long sightlines beneath the footbridge, with peripheral paths rising toward the surrounding streets and planted terraces. Themed sections incorporate roses, heathers, ferns and aquatic planting, giving the edges a denser horticultural structure than the central field. Four sculptures representing female figures occupy the grounds, adding permanent figurative works to the planting scheme. A municipal installation introduced in September 2010 became France's first public fountain dispensing chilled still and sparkling water without charge, connecting the garden with Eau de Paris's drinking-water network. Municipal naming changed in 2014 when the grounds received the additional name of Paul Pernin, born in Oran in 1914 and mayor of the 12th Arrondissement from 1983 to 1995. Pernin had served the Arrondissement during the period when redevelopment of the former railway property was taking shape, giving the dedication a direct connection with the garden's creation era. The renamed grounds retain the original Reuilly designation alongside his name, joining the district's older geography to the late twentieth-century landscape created on the abandoned rail property.
How Jardin de Reuilly - Paul Pernin fits.
Jardin de Reuilly - Paul Pernin works as the anchor for a Picpus outing connecting an adapted nineteenth-century railway viaduct, a surviving station from the Vincennes line and an Art Deco palace created for the 1931 Colonial Exposition.
Begin at Viaduc des Arts, whose masonry arches carried the Vincennes railway toward Bastille before rail service disappeared from the route. Architect Patrick Berger directed rehabilitation of the viaduct beginning in 1989, converting its street-level vaults into workshops devoted to furniture, musical instruments, decorative arts, fashion and restoration. The complex contains 62 arches, with 50 dedicated to artistic crafts, creating a second life for infrastructure originally engineered around steam railway traffic. Continue to Gare de Reuilly, the surviving passenger building from the railway that operated here between 1859 and 1985. The modest station outlasted the surrounding freight yards and escaped the large-scale clearance that accompanied redevelopment of the railway property. Conversion in 2003 gave the building a new institutional function, preserving a physical fragment of the transport system that had determined the district's development for more than a century. Conclude at Palais de la Porte Dorée, built for the 1931 Exposition coloniale internationale under architect Albert Laprade. Alfred Janniot covered its façade with a vast stone relief depicting colonial economies, and the interior combined frescoes, mosaics, ironwork and furniture into an extensive Art Deco decorative program. The building subsequently passed through several museum incarnations before becoming the home of the Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration, retaining the architecture of the exposition as the institution addresses the histories of migration and immigration in France. The progression moves from industrial infrastructure adapted for craftsmanship through a surviving passenger station and culminates in exposition architecture whose changing institutional purpose charts another major reuse of eastern Parisian heritage.
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