After my visit to Place de Nation (see my post yesterday), I had walk in the neighbourhood. The area is generally a mixture of older Haussmann type and more modern buildings, fairly well integrated. You will find quite a bit of green space. 
But there are also traces of when this was a more industrial area during the 19th century. Very close to the Place de la Nation we will find a street with a very speaking and somehow surprising name – Rue des Immeubles Industriels (Industrial Buildings Street). The buildings along this street date from 1872 and are all similar - ground floor and first floor for workshops and then three floors for living. The apartments were from the very beginning equipped with gas, warm and hot water and the street had its own power station. The business here was then basically furniture manufacturing. Today, you will find mostly smaller offices and cabinets downstairs and normal flats on the upper floors. 
Always looking to the left and the right and with a bit of luck you can find small side streets and courtyards with some interesting features. Slightly further away from the Place, where Rue de Montreuil and Rue Titon meet, I found one open gate and discovered what you can see here below and on the top picture. I have no specific info about these buildings, obviously old workshops which have not yet been transformed (or destroyed?). Today they are occupied by some small workshops, some temporary art galleries and a few people seem still to live here, including, I believe, some squatters. I even used one of the stairs to visit the second floor - definitely not the highest standard. 
Walking up Rue Titon I found some other courtyards where the old workshops from the 19th century have been transformed into more modern and quite nice looking small offices and cabinets. 
On this spot you could during the 18th century find a small paper mill where Pilâtre de Rozier, partly using paper as material, was given the opportunity to manufacture a Montgolfier hot air balloon onboard which he, here, in October 1783, became the world’s first astronaut (80 meters, 260 ft, above ground with the Montgolfier retained by ropes). A few weeks later he made the first ever flight from what now is the 16th to the 13th arrondissement in Paris (see two previous posts; 1, 2). 
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