Every street in Brussels has two names. One French. One Dutch. Simple. But there’s one street that has four names. The Rue Edmond Picard (French) and Edmond Picardstraat (Dutch) is also Rue Andrée Geulen (French) and Andrée Geulenstraat (Dutch).
This elegant street also lies in two communes – Ixelles and Uccle – which means it also has two formats of street signs, two mayors and two school systems. No problem. This is Brussels, we can handle it.
The street was originally named after the Belgian lawyer and politician Edmond Picard, who published numerous articles on Belgian law, founded a literary journal and served as a socialist senator. Picard was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times, making him exactly the sort of figure who deserves to have a Brussels street named in recognition of his achievements.
Only Picard also wrote articles that fiercely defended antisemitism and racial discrimination. And so the two communes voted jointly in 2024 to change the street name.
They chose to honour Andrée Geulen, a Brussels school teacher who saved about 300 Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of Belgium by finding host families or religious organisations to hide the children. She also kept details of the children in a series of secret notebooks which allowed them to be reunited with their families (if they had survived) after the war.
But it takes time for a new street name to take root, and at the moment the old street signs are still in place, next to the new versions.
Derek Blyth’s hidden secret of the day: Derek Blyth is the author of the bestselling “The 500 Hidden Secrets of Belgium”. He picks out one of his favourite hidden secrets for The Brussels Times every day.
