Bonnevoie

Bonnevoie is one of the biggest quarters of the city — thirteen and a half thousand people — and the one visitors never see, on the far side of the railway. The name is older than the railway by six centuries. People like to say the Romans called the place Bona Via, the good road, and it did sit at a crossroads where the ways from Dalheim and Itzig met the road down through the Grund to the Fish Market; but the name is not written down before 1238, so the Romans are out of it, and the truth is nobody knows.

What is known is the nuns. On the site of an old leper house, where charitable women had cared for the sick, a Cistercian convent grew up around 1200, confirmed by the pope in 1234, and lasted nearly six hundred years. Count Henry V let the sisters take wood from his forests, John the Blind forgave them their dues, King Wenceslas granted them favours; the convent burned in 1427, 1542, 1558 and 1794, which is why so few of its papers survive, and the French Revolution closed it in 1796 and sold the ruins to an innkeeper who ran the mail coaches to Metz and Trier and kept his horses in the cloister.

Then came the gloves. In 1836 a glove-maker, Jonas Lippmann, moved his works from the old town into the abbey buildings, and Bonnevoie grew as the workers came to live near the factory; by the 1860s, under Auguste Charles, fifteen hundred people were cutting and stitching goatskin gloves here, seven times the village's whole population of 1800, and shipping most of them to the United States. When America put up its tariff walls at the end of the 1880s the business collapsed. The railway had already changed everything: the station of 1859 was built on Bonnevoie's land, and the roundhouses of 1877 stand on it still. The village behind the tracks became a town of railwaymen and factory hands and then of everyone, and it has never stopped growing.