Café Orient
The Café Orient was a gastronomic establishment in Wiesbaden . It was built in 1899 on behalf of Alfred Georgi , the former court cook of Kaiser Wilhelm II , in the north of the city. The architect Carl Dormann commissioned with the construction created a richly structured building in the Moorish style, following the taste of historicism . During its heyday, the café established itself as one of the top addresses in Wiesbaden society. After bankruptcy during the Great Depression , it temporarily closed in 1929. In 1964 the building was demolished.
history
In order to materialize his dream, Georgi settled after his retirement in 1899 Under the oaks , on the northern outskirts above the residential areas, built by the well known Wiesbaden architect Carl Dormann a coffee house. Based on the synagogue on Michelsberg, Dormann created a splendidly designed object in the Arab-Moorish style. The multiply structured building received three distinctive mosque-like domed towers at its corners . The facade was adorned with different colored clinker bricks attached in stripes as well as oriental decorations highlighted in blue. The windows and surrounding ornaments showed jagged arcades in the shape of horseshoes and donkey backs. The Wiesbaden sculptor and plasterer Ludwig Wagner was hired for the interior work. Some of the manual work was done by workers specially recruited from Morocco.
After its inauguration on March 20, 1900, the café in the wooded foothills of the Taunus quickly developed into a popular excursion destination for high society. For Georgi, however, the construction ended in a financial disaster. Despite the large number of visitors, he was unable to repay the 180,000 mark mortgage that was on the property. Christian Schnorr, who came from Nuremberg, bought the house in December 1901, but he too had taken over financially and handed it over to the confectioner Karl Berges just three years later. Debts became too much of a burden for him too. When the First World War broke out and his wife left him, he sold the café for 150,000 marks to the hotel specialist Georges Richefort from Alsace, who had previously leased the coffee house from him.
Richefort and his wife Lina led the house to new heights. Not least because of the French occupation troops stationed in the city, who liked to visit the establishment, the café became a meeting place for the upper class during the Roaring Twenties . Lush celebrations and balls shaped the city's social life. In the meantime, Richefort was considering building an additional ballroom for 1,000 people. With the onset of the economic crisis, however, the guests increasingly stayed away towards the end of the golden decade. Eventually Richefort had to file for bankruptcy in November 1929. The house was temporarily closed and went to Gustav Düllberg for the sum of 70,000 marks. Although the café reopened, there wasn't enough money left to carry out urgently needed remedial measures.
After the end of World War II , the house continued to decline. The master craftsman, in whose possession it had meanwhile passed, reduced the area used for gastronomy and rented out the rest of the building. In the meantime, it housed a costume rental shop, a pest controller and a ballet school. When the owner died, his heirs sold it to a real estate company. On April 16, 1964, the excavators rolled in to demolish the café. An eight-story residential building was built in its place.
Other examples of orientalist architecture from this era are the Arabian Café in Düsseldorf or the Yenidze cigarette factory in Dresden .
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Coordinates: 50 ° 5 '44.6 " N , 8 ° 13' 8.8" E