On 7 June 1846 a music society opened a summer concert hall and a private garden on the Mechelsesteenweg in Antwerp. The Société Royale d’Harmonie had about 900 honorary members that year and would reach about 2,200 by 1895. Its garden is now the Harmoniepark, a public park since 1924, and its ballroom has held the offices of the district of Antwerp since 2021. The neoclassical hall at Mechelsesteenweg 216 is the reason the park exists, and the reason it has the name.

The heritage inventory draws the site of the hall at 18,315 square metres. Inside it are the hall and its orangery, a gardener’s house of 1889 on the Harmoniestraat, a fountain by Henry van de Velde and an English landscape garden of sloping lawns and winding paths. The streets around it are named for music: the Harmoniestraat on one side, the Mozartstraat on another.

A garden for the Harmonie

The society is older than its hall. A founding deed of a Société Champêtre, dated 27 February 1813, is the oldest trace that Jakob Ulens, who has written the society’s history, has found; the city archivist of the 19th century gave February 1814, when amateur musicians are said to have started it. It had regulations by 1824 and the title Royal from 1829, the year Willem I, then king of the United Netherlands, came to one of its garden parties with an estimated 4,000 other guests. In 1839 its fireworks depicted the eruption of Vesuvius.

In 1844 the board took an option on land on the Mechelsesteenweg that had belonged to the Mosselman family, and paid for it by issuing 1,250 shares of 100 francs each. Around 1230 the same ground had held a leper house called Ter Zieken. The society held a design competition, and a jury that included Pierre Bruno Bourla, the city architect whose Bourla theatre on the Komedieplaats had opened a decade earlier, chose the design of Pieter Dens. He was 25 and had graduated only in 1839; from 1863 to 1884 he was city architect himself. The first stone went down on 16 July 1845. A board member, Guillaume Verbert, laid out the garden in the English landscape style. At the opening, Félix Grisar was the society’s director and Antoine Bessems conducted the concert.

The garden was the point. The royal family came to a garden party after a royal wedding in September 1853, and on 13 July 1856 a garden concert drew more than 5,000 people. The society added a winter hall of 1,690 square metres in 1864, opened with a banquet on 20 August, and in 1889 and 1890 Charles Dens, a relative of Pieter, nearly doubled the summer hall. He added two bays at the back, a barrel vault, a semicircular apse for the orchestra and a five-bay colonnade on the garden side with cast-iron galleries, and he built the gardener’s house that still stands. The enlarged hall was opened with a concert on 1 June 1890.

From members to everyone

The members drifted away before the music stopped. The society had 1,349 members in 1913 and about 330 in 1918. In March 1923 the city council approved buying the site, and the sale went through that November. The city renovated the hall in 1924 as a public function room, and a newspaper reported it almost entirely renewed. On 31 May 1924 the former private garden opened as a public park, on the same day as an exhibition called Onze Parken, our parks, held in the hall by the Vereniging tot Behoud van Natuur- en Stedenschoon, a society for the protection of nature and townscape. The province had opened the Rivierenhof, its estate in Deurne, to the public the year before. Two private estates became public parks within a year of each other.

The hall’s war is recorded too. During the Second World War it served as a communal dining room. On 11 September 1942 Fanny David and other Jews were arrested there in a raid, and the hall’s caretaker, Pierre Pilaet, was arrested and executed for his resistance work. From the 1960s the hall was used more and more for dances and later for parties, and from 1977 to 1979 it was a nightclub. Many of its original features disappeared under later fittings, and the interior was completely renovated in 1980. The hall and its orangery became a protected monument on 10 July 1997.

Benoit’s fountain

In the southern corner of the park stands a memorial to the composer Peter Benoit (1834 to 1901), a blue-stone fountain with a stone harp at its centre, designed by Henry van de Velde. It was inaugurated on 12 December 1934 in front of the Flemish Opera on the Frankrijklei and moved to the Harmonie garden in the early 1950s: a monument to a composer, in a park laid out for concerts. It was protected in 1997 and restored to working order in May 2017. A stone in the grass in front of it marks the centenary of the Red Cross, 1859 to 1959, and honours its founder, Henri Dunant.

A ballroom for the district

The restoration started with an open call by the Flemish Government Architect, published in July 2009. On 27 April 2010 the jury chose Atelier Kempe Thill, a Rotterdam practice, working with the Antwerp architects RE-ST and the landscape architects LAND, over four other shortlisted teams. The construction budget was €4.9 million. The brief also asked for a quiet room in the park, for ceremonies for people who use no church, mosque, synagogue or funeral parlour. The park was redesigned first, in 2015, as a 19th-century landscape park, and the revived Benoit fountain is part of it. Work on the building ran from 2017 to 2021: stucco inside and out restored or reconstructed, wooden joinery on the façades, original roof coverings, and new standards for climate, acoustics and energy behind the old walls.

On 28 May 2021 the district of Antwerp moved its town hall here from the Lange Gasthuisstraat. The city’s service desk is in the old concert hall, the district aldermen work in the former caretaker’s house at Mozartstraat 7, and the district council meets in the orangery. Putting the district in the ballroom was the right decision. A hall built for a society of shareholders, then let for dances, now serves anyone with business at the city’s service desk, and the garden that was once private is its forecourt.

The Harmonie raised 125,000 francs in shares to buy its garden in 1844. Since 1924 the city has let everyone in.