Nordhof workers' colony

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The Nordhof workers 'colony was an early workers' settlement in Essen , which was built by the Krupp company in 1871 for their workers.

history

At the beginning of the 1860s, Alfred Krupp felt compelled to create living space himself for his steadily increasing number of workers in his rapidly expanding cast steel factory on the site of today's Krupp belt . A worsening housing shortage in Essen resulted from the immigration of workers for the Krupp industry, but also the emerging mining in the region. Thereupon Alfred Krupp set up an in-house construction office under the direction of the government master builder Gustav Kraemer . After the construction of two so-called Masters' Houses in 1861/1862 and the Alt-Westend workers' colony in 1863, Krupp also had the Nordhof workers' colony built to the northeast in 1871, adjacent to the cast steel factory.

Alfred Krupp had the workers' colonies Schederhof , Baumhof and Kronenberg follow by 1874 . After 1874, because of the onset of recession and the resulting near-bankruptcy of the Krupp company, Krupp's residential construction was discontinued. After Alfred Krupp's death in 1887, his son Friedrich Alfred Krupp and the head of the Krupp construction office, Robert Schmohl , took up residential construction again, which took on completely new dimensions from 1891 with the Alfredshof and Altenhof settlements .

The Nordhof colony

Construction work on the 1.5 hectare site, separated from the factory by a railway embankment, began in the spring of 1871. By the winter of 1871/1872, after around seven months of construction, the colony was ready for occupancy. A total of eleven blocks of houses with a total of 162 apartments were arranged in an L-shape as perimeter block development. This created a spatial unit around a courtyard with various communal facilities. Even more clearly than in the Westend colony, the architecture here is characterized by fast and cheap solutions, as Krupp's workforce has migrated again due to the shortage of living space in Essen. The half-timbering was uniformly boarded from the outside. Due to the geographical location in the northeast of the large factory site, the air pollution from the predominant westerly winds here was very high.

In nine of the eleven two-story apartment blocks there were 126 apartments, each with two rooms on around 42 m², and intended for single workers. The apartments were at times occupied by up to six or seven people. Both rooms were accessed through a small hallway and had access to the fireplace. The 36 apartments on the other two blocks were slightly larger and had three and four rooms. All upper floors could only be accessed by an external staircase, offset from the ground floor entrances on the opposite side of the house. Both entrances had a pedestal, from which you could get to one of the two apartments via a door, which was also used as a balcony-like exit. Toilets could only be reached via the outside area in separate houses between the narrow sides of the houses.

Several communal facilities, such as a consumer establishment , a coal shop, a cruet (building for feeding single workers), a shoemaker, a fire station and the industrial school building in the middle of the colony shaped its character. In 1877 the consumer institution was made available to non-residents of the Nordhof colony for a while. The industrial school was reserved exclusively for school-age girls from the cast steel factory employees. In 1890, an average of 785 students in the north courtyard attended this school who were being taught handicrafts.

Current condition

Around 1914, the Nordhof workers' colony was closed due to factory expansions. There are no remains of the former workers' colony. Also of the former embankment, which was about west of today's course of Mittelstrasse and once separated the colony from the factory site, only the bridge over Altendorfer Strasse, which has been redesigned for pedestrians, still exists. After the Second World War , a red-light district developed on the site, which was part of Essen's industrial and working-class district Segeroth , in partly sporadic post-war buildings, which still exists north of Nordhofstraße to this day.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Welfare institutions of the von Fried cast steel factory. Krupp zu Essen an der Ruhr, 2nd edition, 1891 (PDF file; 877 kB); accessed on July 11, 2018
  2. ^ Erwin Dickhoff: Essener streets . Ed .: City of Essen - Historical Association for City and Monastery of Essen. Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8375-1231-1 .

Coordinates: 51 ° 27 '41.4 "  N , 7 ° 0' 7.2"  E