being discharged into the river by the city - especially the waste of the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, where there were many sick, which spanned the small arm of the river between the Ile de la Cité and the left bank. In the late 19th century, commercial activities developed at the basin. In the same period the Moselle footbridge (13 metres high and a span of 85 metres) was built by Armand Moisant. It was decorated with a clock 3 metres in diameter. This bridge was replaced in 1966. The Second basin The Lifting bridge of the Rue de Crimée or Pont de Flandre, a lifting bridge weighing 85 tons built in 1885, separates the two basins. It allows traffic on the Rue de Crimée to cross the canal and connects the Quai de l'Oise on the north-west side to the Quai de la Marne on the south-east side. When the bridge is raised pedestrian traffic can still continue on a fixed elevated walkway. At the time of its construction it was the third largest lifting bridge to be built in France. It is now the last one in Paris and is registered as an historical monument. The second basin measures 30 m wide and 730 m long. This basin, which is often prematurely named the Canal de l'Ourcq, originally ran along the back of the old village of La Villette. At its northern end is the "roundabout of canals" where the Bassin de la Villette converges with the Canal de l'Ourcq (which brings water for more than 100 km from the river Ourcq) and the Saint-Denis canal which, with a length of 6,647.50 m and a slope of 28.45 m, joins the Seine at Saint-Denis, as well as the small Darse du fond de Rouvray canal (a port for the canal ferry boats). Warehouses There are two buildings at the end of the Bassin de la Villette that were built between 1845 and 1853 as commercial warehouses, but which had a certain utilitarian beauty. They were known as "general merchandise warehouses" and they were first used to store grain and flour. Their design, execution, and placement were based on the urban plans originally conceived by Claude Nicolas Ledoux in the eighteenth century, and they operated in perfect symmetry at the Bassin de la Villette, one on the Quai de la Seine side, and one on the Quai de la Loire