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 reigns to the west of the city, the canal, to the east -, they tend to constitute the limits of urban development until 1870. After 1870, industrial activity in the eastern sector increased. Favoured by the establishment of the bypass railway between 1872 and 1878, it is part of the industrial development of the Meurthe valley, timidly started in the first half of the 1860s with salt mining in the South-East 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 channels of communication and forms the moving matrix of East Nancy: warehouses, service plants and industrial equipment, slaughterhouses and food branches. Endangered since the early 1970s, its industrial character was superimposed on an older proto-industrialization, of which the Grands Moulins are a powerfully signposting element of a neighborhood in constant evolution.