Concordia Lake (Oberhausen)

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Lake Concordia

The Concordia lake was a groundwater lake in the area of ​​today's city of Oberhausen . It was the result of a subsidence caused by the Concordia colliery . The lake , at times 13 hectares in size, existed from around 1870 to 1880 and thwarted the planning of a city ​​center .

history

The 1860s were marked by a building boom in Oberhausen , a mayor's office that was only formed in 1862 . The background to this development was industrialization , which took on its first concrete form with the construction of a train station for the Cologne-Mindener Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft in Lipper Heide in 1846 and the construction of the Concordia colliery in 1850, immediately northwest of the train station. Other industrial companies and scattered housing estates, which gave the whole thing the character of an "industrial village", soon followed. At that time, however, a real town center had not yet formed. Just one market square, today's Altmarkt , emerged from 1859 next to Friedrich-Karl-Straße as the spatial center of a weak business population. Friedrich August Schwartz , the first mayor of the young community, therefore first tried, through a "town plan", which, in accordance with local building regulations, provided for at least two-story construction, on what was then Friedrichstrasse (today Buschhausener Strasse), northwest of the train station and near the Duisburg-Essener Chaussee (today Duisburger Straße), the center of a city with all the necessary facilities. But after this attempt failed because the Cologne-Mindener Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft canceled the level crossing there, which now extended over eleven tracks, Schwartz took an area southeast of the station (in the area of ​​today's Tannenbergstrasse and today's Ebertstrasse) as an alternative the development of a city center and denser development in the urban planning perspective. In 1868, however, difficulties arose, which Schwartz described in an administrative report 1870/1871 as follows:

" The terrain chosen for the development of the community and specifically the planned urban area was hardly opened up as a new calamity, (...) the subsidence, due to the finally completed division of the Lippern-Lirich community heath laid out in building lots and through the public sale in plots. Floor cracks and cracks in houses, the further structural development within the projected city plan, obstructing and halting and not only caused the most sensitive damage to the owners of the buildings, but also to the buyers of the building plots, but especially halted the entire development of the community. (...) Church building, town hall building etc. are suspended, and the private building activity, which is already in the process of being developed, is also to be regarded as concluded for the time being. The building sites are devalued and not for sale. Mortgages are not obtainable and there is no telling when this calamity will end. "

Schwartz used it to describe the consequences of a mountain subsidence , which was attributed to the nearby Concordia colliery. A lake fed by groundwater in the depression soon afterwards with a depth of up to two meters and an area of ​​at times 13 hectares, which stretched along today's Tannenbergstrasse (between Schwartzstrasse, Berlin Park and the southern end of John-Lennon-Platz), received accordingly the name Concordia Lake . He flooded streets and a few houses that had already been built.

consequences

The urban development consequences were serious because the immediate structural developments continued to take place without being guided by a generally binding plan. In the spring of 1873, with a view to the threat of further damage to the mountains, the municipal council lifted the building regulations stipulating that at least two storeys had to be built in the center of the municipality. This meant that the entire municipal area was evenly released for almost any type of development. The town hall building was moved to a site above the lake on the "Galgenberg" (at the top of today's Schwartzstrasse). The construction begun in 1873, a forerunner of today's town hall , which was built at roughly the same location between 1927 and 1930 , was inaugurated in 1874. The southern municipality on Friedrich-Karl-Straße and today's Altmarkt developed into the center of structural and commercial densification. When Schwartz and his city architect Albert Regelmann began trying to establish the Neumarkt (now Ebertplatz), which is further north, as a planning city and business center, this approach failed because of the economic realities that had grown up in the meantime, which successfully organized political resistance to the planning . Lake Concordia, which literally "dropped into the water" in the second and third attempts by Mayor Schwartz to create a city center, developed into the "greatest debacle of mining damage in the city's history" ( Hans Reif ).

In 1877, Concordia AG, the owner of the mine of the same name, built a pumping station to drain the lake it had created. However, since this only eliminated "the worst evils", the city and the mine agreed to build a drainage canal up to the Ruhr with the participation of the company Grillo, which was also interested. This was completed in 1880 and next to Lake Concordia, a floodplain between the Concordia- Shafts I and II / III drained. Gradually, urban streets and public facilities were also connected to this sewer system. The planning of further connections was given up around 1900 after it had become clear that the drainage technology of the canal built in 1880 was not suitable for discharging faeces. The drained areas of Lake Concordia became a preferred residential area at the end of the 19th century. Among other things, the Villa Concordia was built there in 1897 as the residence of the mining director of Concordia AG .

Also because the mining damage was explained at the time with the erroneous assumption that industry had caused the subsidence through heavy use of the groundwater, the municipality, which was elevated to a city in 1874, received a modern water supply system relatively early. As early as 1871, the Cologne-Mindener Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft and several large Oberhausen companies merged to found the Oberhausener Wasserwerke AG.

See also

literature

  • Hans Reif : The belated city. Industrialization, urban space and politics in Oberhausen 1846–1929 . Landschaftsverband Rheinland, Rheinisches Industriemuseum, Writings, Volume 7, Rheinland-Verlag, Cologne 1993, ISBN 3-7927-1316-0 , p. 177 ff.
  • Magnus Dellwig: The founding of a community and becoming a town in the industrial city of Oberhausen. From the initiator of the railway in 1846 to the expansion as an industrial city in 1914 . In: Magnus Dellwig, Peter Langer (Ed.): Oberhausen. A city history in the Ruhr area . Volume 2: Oberhausen in the industrial age . Aschendorff Verlag, Münster 2012, ISBN 978-3-402-12957-9 , p. 125 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Administrative report 1870/1871, p. 12, quoted from Hans Reif, p. 181
  2. ↑ Hans Reif, p. 238 f.
  3. ↑ Hans Reif, p. 219

Coordinates: 51 ° 28 ′ 30 ″  N , 6 ° 51 ′ 30 ″  E