For three centuries the Markgravelei kept its semi-rural character. Country houses lined the lime avenues, interspersed with market gardens and orchards. In 1659 the parish of Saint-Laurentius was founded with a first church on the Fransenplaats. The district survived siege, occupation and revolution as a kind of green pocket on the city's southern edge, a place where Antwerp's merchant class kept retreats they could reach by carriage in twenty minutes. Then the nineteenth century arrived. From the 1860s onward the great gardens began to be subdivided. Modest neoclassical terraced houses, two storeys high and two or three bays wide, filled in the gaps. The first industrial workshops appeared on the long parcels between the Markgravelei and the parallel Haantjeslei, where the De Beukelaer distillery would eventually rise. The young architect Jos Bascourt, who would later become a leading Antwerp Art Nouveau designer, designed his very first house here in 1887, a commission from his aunt Marie-Eugenie Buelens at the start of a long career.

The deepest transformation came after 1904, when the Maatschappij Belpaire and Company parcelled out a vast tract of adjoining land and set out to build a distinguished residential quarter for the upper middle class. New streets sprouted on both sides. The Arthur Goemaerelei, Van Putlei and Bosmanslei were laid out to the south; the Robert Molsstraat and Lemmestraat to the north. In 1909 the new Jan Van Rijswijcklaan cut a wide boulevard through the eastern end of the Markgravelei. Stately townhouses went up by the dozen, almost all of them before the First World War interrupted the building boom. The widow Henriette Mayer van den Bergh, an Antwerp art patron whose collection later became one of the city's great museums, commissioned no fewer than nine buildings here between 1905 and 1908, all by the architect Joseph Hertogs. Contractors like Arthur Van Rijsseghem and Edouard Van Biesen built houses for sale or rent and moved in themselves. The typical client was a magistrate, a trader, an artist, an annuitant, or what the inventory of the period charmingly calls "an unmarried woman of standing."

Walk the Markgravelei today and you are walking through a syllabus of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European architecture. Neoclassicism survives in the modest 1860s terraces, with brick facades stuccoed in pale tones, restrained mouldings, narrow windows. Eclecticism dominates the Mayer van den Bergh houses, drawing on Renaissance and Baroque grammars at will. Neo-Gothic shows up in the stately Hotel Muller, a Joseph Hertogs design of 1907, and in the architect's own house that Michel De Braey built for himself in 1911. The richest expression is Art Nouveau: the four houses Edmond Lauwens designed for Van Biesen in 1910 and 1911, the Hotel Ceulemans by Jacques De Weerdt in 1911, the house Rodolphe Frank built for the Goedertier family in 1905, and the house Laurent Duvivier and Adolphe Van Coppernolle designed in 1912 for the writer Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire, who was already by then one of the leading voices in Flemish Catholic letters. Brick, natural stone and plaster are mixed and matched, sometimes on a single facade, in a kind of bourgeois show of erudition. Some of the most striking houses have been lost, demolished in the 1960s or stripped of their plaster, but enough remains for the street to feel cohesive.

The greatest interbellum addition is the Sint-Laurentiuskerk that Jef Huygh built between 1932 and 1941, a sober neo-Byzantine Art Deco church whose tall bell tower anchors the district. Jan De Vroey added an elegant ensemble of five Beaux-Arts and Art Deco townhouses for the Hertoghe-Belpaire children in 1933. From the 1950s onward, a familiar story unfolded: scattered Art Nouveau houses were demolished to make way for what the heritage inventory dryly calls "rather banal apartment buildings." The diamond cutting factory of Lipschutz and Gutwirth, an Art Deco industrial fragment from 1923 by Cols and De Roeck, survives only as a hidden piece behind a later apartment block at number 43-45. The single most striking survivor is also the oldest: the Torenhof, a free-standing house tower that probably dates to the seventeenth century, the last remnant of Van Schoonbeke's original courts of pleasure. The whole street is now part of the thematic heritage inventory "Leikwartier en omgeving," recognised as a coherent record of how a Flemish bourgeoisie wanted to be housed at the moment it became prosperous enough to choose.