Nancy entered the era of contemporary industrialization after 1853, when the Paris-Strasbourg railway and the Marne-au-Rhin canal were commissioned. Offering parallel but disjointed routes - the railway rule to the west of the city, the canal to the east- they tended to constitute the limits of urban development until 1870. After 1870, industrial activity in the eastern sector strengthened. Encouraged by the establishment of the bypass railway between 1872 and 1878, it is part of the industrial development of the Meurthe valley, timidly begun in the first half of the 1860s with the exploitation of salt in the SouthEast of Nancy and the establishment of the first steel plants. The influx of exogenous capital, Belgian, then Alsatian, induces a new dynamism that revolves around the communication channels and forms the moving matrix of Eastern Nancy: warehouses, service plants and industrial equipment, slaughterhouses and branches of a food nature. Endangered since the early 1970s, its industrial character was superimposed on an earlier proto-industrialization, of which the Grands Moulins constitute a powerfully signalling element of a constantly evolving district.