In this essentially workaday district we see many houses old and quaint, but without architectural beauty or special historic interest. Round the park des Buttes-Chaumont, a large expanse of greenswards and shady alleys, dull, squalid streets branch out amid coal-yards and factories. Beneath the park are the ancient quarries which erewhile gave so much white stone and plaster of Paris to the city builders. The name Chaumont is derived, perhaps, from _mons calvus_, _mont chauve_, i.e. bald mountain. In Rue de Flandres, formerly Grande Rue de la Villette, we see a Jewish cemetery. Nos. 61 to 65 are on the site where the well-known institution Ste-Perine, come hither from Compiègne, was first established in Paris as a convent community in the seventeenth century, removed to Chaillot in 1742, then to Auteuil, its present site. We find ancient houses, some old signs, along the course of this old street, and at No. 152 an interesting door, pavilion and bas-relief.
Rue de Belleville marks the bounds of the arrondissement. Along its course and in the adjacent streets we see many vestiges of the past. Rue des Bois shows us some fine old gardens as yet undisturbed. In Rue de l'Orme, Elm Road, opening out of it, we find the remains of an ancient park. Rue Pré-St-Gervais was a country road till 1837. From the top of the steps in the picturesque Rue des Lilas we have a fine view across the neighbouring _banlieue_. In the grounds of No. 40 we come upon three benches formed of gravestones. Rue Compans was in the eighteenth century and onwards Rue St-Denis. The church of St-Jean-Baptiste, quite modern, is of excellent style and workmanship. The lower end of Rue de Belleville leads us into arrondissement XX.
The lower end of the long Rue de Belleville, its odd-number side in arrondissement XIX, went in olden days by the name Rue des Courtilles--Inn Street. Inns, cabarets, popular places of amusement stood door by door all along its course. Here, as in arrondissement XIX, we find on every side old houses and vestiges of the past, but of no particular interest beyond the quaintness of their aspect. Rue Pelleport began in the eighteenth century as an avenue encircling the park of Ménilmontant. In the grounds surrounding the reservoirs we come upon a tomb, a modern gravestone, covering the remains of a municipal functionary whose dying wish was to be buried on his own estate.