At the wagon

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The Fuhr in Elberfeld, early 1880s

In the 19th century, an der Fuhr was a slum on the edge of the historic center of the city of Elberfeld , on the southern bank of the Wupper . The area has now been completely built over.

Location description

The Fohre on a drawn cityscape of Elberfeld from 1771.
Map of the street Fuhr 1849 shortly after the opening of the Elberfeld main station.

The district of An der Fuhr was crossed by the former Fuhrstrasse and was located directly on the left, southern bank of the Wupper , below the administration building of the Reichsbahndirektion Elberfeld (later the Federal Railway Directorate ).

It was accessible via a ford and later via the Icelander Bridge and from Alte Freiheit .

In 1841 the line of the Düsseldorf-Elberfelder Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft reached its provisional end point Döppersberg above the Fuhr .

The station building was opened in 1848 . The railway directorate right next to the station was moved into in 1875 and for decades formed a strong contrast to the run-down half-timbered houses that stood at their feet by the wagon .

history

Döppersberger Bridge around 1870. On the right the Fuhr below the railway headquarters.
Die Fuhr , 1887. In the background the Elberfeld Railway Directorate.

As early as the 18th century, outside of the historic city center, next to nearby Iceland (former quarter on the site that is now between the Wilhelm-Dörpfeld-Gymnasium and the Sparkasse head office ) and on the further north located Bachstrasse (today the Gathe ) Even in the area that was still called the Fohre at that time, slums slowly emerged.

Due to the economic upswing that Elberfeld took in the course of the beginning industrialization , more and more people moved into the valley of the Wupper , who could not be granted enough accommodation. Most textile-processing craftsmen settled in the angled poor district of An der Fuhr . The growing proletariat lived and worked under catastrophic hygienic and increasingly worsening conditions of misery in dark and damp residential areas with tightly packed and nested, narrow, multi-storey half - timbered houses , constantly threatened by floods from the Wupper, fires or epidemics.

Sleepers who shared a bed by the hour in someone else's apartment for a small rent - this worked best for shift workers - was one of the worst manifestations of the housing shortage. At the end of the 1840s, the mission inspector Friedrich Fabri saw the "construction of an overcrowded house that looked like a bad stable, (in a small room) ten people of both sexes and different ages covered in a bed with rags". After 1850, industrialization caused the population in Elberfeld and neighboring Barmen to explode. While 18,783 inhabitants were counted in Elberfeld in 1810, there were already 47,131 in 1850, and 156,963 in 1900. The social problems of pauperism intensified, "the old houses on the river degenerated more and more into bad caves of misery, and up to sixteen people crowded into the sometimes tiny dwellings".

The authorities register the catastrophic living conditions, but found no remedy. The Elberfeld system of voluntary poor welfare reached the limits of its capabilities. The Fuhr only briefly touched on a contemporary description of Elberfeld : “But we return to Iceland, take a look at the massive Icelander bridge at the end of the same in the direction of Wallstrasse , then quickly cross the Fuhr , a narrow one that is not in the best of renown standing street, and from there you get to the Wupperbrücke on Döppersberg . "

At the Fuhr , at the beginning of the 1880s, looking towards the further western course.

In 1858, over 800 people fell victim to cholera in the Wupper valley. The years 1866/67 went down in the city's history as the “epidemic years” when another cholera epidemic claimed almost 1,000 lives. The poor districts of Elberfeld were particularly hard hit. The cramped living, the polluted drinking water, the inadequate sewage disposal - the Wupper mutated into a sewer - and garbage pits in the immediate vicinity of the apartment were the consequences of a chaotic urbanization process .

View from the Sparkasse tower 2012, on the right the railway headquarters building, on the left the Wupper.

In the years that followed, the Fuhr developed more and more into a notorious brothel street, where children paid by pimps and the police engaged in a “war of attention”. Police reports describe the conditions drastically and name an ever-increasing number of "corner brothels".

On the western edge of the Döppersberg, large parts of the old Fuhr were demolished from 1885 and the Neue Fuhrstrasse was built in 1886/87 , with modern rental and commercial buildings. The situation created in these years on Döppersberg with the station forecourt and Brausenwerther Platz remained essentially unchanged in its structural structure until 1943.

Rebuilding of federal highway 7 in the area of ​​the former Fuhr , 2016. On the left in the picture the railway headquarters building.

At the latest when Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Elberfeld in 1900, the concern arose to ban the remaining shameful sight from the center and to build new architecture there with a lot of capital. In 1906 the magnificent Thalia Theater was built on the banks of the Iceland . The complete destruction of the district in 1943 by the air raid on Elberfeld in World War II preceded its planned demolition.

In 1947, the Wuppertal city council decided to expand federal road 7 in the Döppersberg area to meet the expected traffic requirements. In 1955, work began on building over the former Fuhrstrasse ; In 1965 the new traffic junction on Döppersberg was completed.

In the course of a renewed renovation of the area on Döppersberg, the main station with the station forecourt will be given a new face by 2018. For this purpose, federal road 7 in the area of ​​the former Fuhr between the two future junctions Bahnhofstrasse and Morianstrasse was lowered and a business bridge connecting the station forecourt and the Alte Freiheit was built over.

Literary processing

The writer Otto Hausmann , who grew up at An der Fuhr himself , processed his childhood in the dialect epic Mina Knallenfalls .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Gerhard Birker, Heinrich-Karl Schmitz, Wolfgang Winkelsen: Otto Hausmann. From the father of "Mina Knallenfalls" to the poet of the singing brothers. In: Wuppertal biographies. Contributions to the history and local history of the Wuppertal. Volume 17, Volume 37. Born Verlag, Wuppertal 1993. ISBN 3-87093-065-9 , pp. 65-83.
  2. ↑ a b Kolping Locations . In: wuppertal-marketing.de
  3. ^ Michael Magner: Wuppertal-Elberfeld: Briller district and north city. Sutton Verlag GmbH, 2003. p. 7.
  4. ↑ a b Wuppertal originals. In: minaknallenfalls.de of March 27, 2009
  5. ↑ Werner Krötz, Michael Knieriem: The industrial city of Wuppertal. Rheinland-Verlag, Wuppertal 1982. p. 40.
  6. ↑ garbage history in Wuppertal. AWG Abfallwirtschaftsgesellschaft, Wuppertal 2006. ISBN 3-000-19280-8 . P. 11.
  7. ↑ garbage history in Wuppertal. AWG Abfallwirtschaftsgesellschaft, Wuppertal 2006. ISBN 3-000-19280-8 . P. 15.
  8. ↑ a b Detlef Vonde: Distributing and diluting - on epidemics and hygiene in Wuppertal in the 19th century. In: Westdeutsche Zeitung of August 26, 2017.
  9. ↑ Wilhelm Langewiesche (Ed.): Description and history of this twin town of the Wuppertal together with a special presentation of their industry, an overview of the Bergisch regional history etc. Langewiesche's publishing and assortment bookstore, Barmen 1863. P. 51.
  10. ↑ Town square and traffic intersection. The history of the Döppersberg. ( Memento from December 25, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) In: doeppersberg.de
  11. ^ Herbert Günther: Wuppertal in early photographs. 1880-1945. Sutton-Verlag, Wuppertal 2013. ISBN 3-954-00176-4 . P. 34.
  12. ↑ Pictures from Wuppertal. Elberfeld center. In: zeitspurensuche.de
  13. ↑ 1955-2004. The traffic intersection. ( Memento from December 29, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) In: wuppertal.de
  14. ↑ construction site. A new gateway to the city is being built in Wuppertal-Elberfeld! In: doeppersberg.info