The park was built by Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, the engineer who headed the service of promenades and plantations created by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, with the assistance of city architect Gabriel Davioud and horticulturist Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps. This was the team which together made the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, and the other great landscape parks of the Second Empire. The project was decided in 1865, but construction did not actually begin until 1867, because of the long negotiations needed to buy the parcels of land needed for the park. The purpose of the park, according to Alphand, was "to bring life and movement to the center of a quarter until then left to isolation and abandon. "