Floßplatz (Leipzig)
Coordinates: 51 ° 19 ′ 48.8 ″ N , 12 ° 22 ′ 18 ″ E
| Raft place | |
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| Basic data | |
| place | Leipzig |
| District | Center-South |
| Created | 17th century |
| Newly designed | from 1867 |
| Confluent streets | Harkortstrasse, Dufourstrasse, Riemannstrasse, Münzgasse, Hohe Strasse, Audorfstrasse, Paul-Gruner-Strasse |
| use | |
| User groups | Car traffic , public transport , foot traffic |
| Technical specifications | |
| Square area | approx. 2.0 ha |
The raft place - in Leipzig with a short O - is the remnant of a larger historical facility, which for centuries served to supply the city of Leipzig with firewood, but also with construction wood. It owes its name to its function as an urban stacking and sales point for the wood rafted over the Elster and Pleiße rivers. In its history, it was therefore sometimes also known as the wood or “electoral wood place”.
location
Today's raft square is an elongated (approx. 65 × 300 meters) and two hectare urban square with a green area in the inner south suburb in the district center-south . It is bounded by Riemannstrasse (formerly Albertstrasse) in the north and Paul-Gruner-Strasse (formerly Sidonienstraße) in the south and forms the transition from Harkortstrasse to Dufourstrasse over a length of around 300 meters. This means that the western side of the square is also a section of the busy federal highway 2 . It is on the edge of the music district ; its west side is now part of the "conservation area" of the music district.
The historic Floßplatz was near the Petersvorstadt and formerly extended westward beyond today's dimensions to the Pleißemühlgraben - about to Lampestrasse - and was therefore more than twice as large as the existing one. Not far from the Floßplatz, at the end of Münzgasse, there used to be the Münztor , which was sometimes also called the Raft Gate after the square. Up until the 19th century, the gate was the only access to the city via the Peterssteinweg from the raft square , so that the timber imports had to be cleared here.
history
From 1610 to 1865 the raft yard was in operation as the city's central transshipment point for timber and firewood. In addition to the alluvial forests south and west of the city (Ratsholz), Leipzig's need for wood was largely covered by rafting on Elster and Pleiße from the Vogtland and Altenburger Land . To this end, the city council took part in the construction of the Elster raft ditch (so-called “Kleiner or Leipziger raft ditch”), which branched off from the White Elster to the west at Pegau . The Elsterfloßgraben was in turn connected to the Pleißemühlgraben so that the wood could be rafted almost right up to the city walls of Leipzig. From the Pleißemühlgraben branches as raft ditches led from south to north to the raft place, which could hold up to 21,000 cubic meters of wood and sometimes employed around 100 wood forklifts.
These raft ditches led back into the Pleißemühlgraben at Riemannstraße. This prevented standing water from forming because the water could circulate in the raft ditches. Nevertheless, the whole terrain was considered unhealthy for centuries , also because of the nearby ponds of Schimmels Gut (No. 6 on the map) and the swamps of the floodplain landscape , as it was contaminated by mosquitoes. Because of this and also because of the unsound muddy terrain, the development of the square remained quite modest until 1865, when rafting was given up in favor of timber transport by rail. Except for Schimmel's estate on the northern edge and a few one to two-story houses and a garden restaurant, the raft place was undeveloped.
As part of the development and development of the music quarter and the southern suburb , the raft place was also fundamentally redesigned, with the raft ditches being filled in in 1867. The raft square was converted into a decorative square with a green area in 1873. The horticultural design came from the city gardening director Otto Wittenberg (1834-1918). The square was planted all around with plane trees, which still exist today. From the center of the two-part square - interrupted by Hohe Straße - paths led to the edges in a fan shape. Two public children's playgrounds were laid out within the green area, one in the middle of the two halves of the square.
At the end of the 19th century, representative bourgeois residential buildings, such as in the adjacent music district, dominated the west side of the Floßplatz. The houses were built in the style of historicism . The start of the new building was made in 1887 by the Wilhelminian-style residential building at Floßplatz No. 31, which was built as a tenement house for the master mason Friedrich Louis Winkler based on a design by the architect Hugo Franz. The building had the intended representative effect thanks to its wide façade and the plastic decorations on the piano nobile . The design for the residential building at Floßplatz No. 26, built in 1910, comes from the architect Emil Franz Hänsel (1870–1943) , who was important for Leipzig .
On the east side, two new school buildings were built, the III. District school and the secondary school 1st order , which was renamed the Petri School after the new St. Peter's Church was built in 1885 . On this side of the square stood the first power station that supplied the electricity for the tram. Since 1884 the horse-drawn tram has been running from Augustusplatz via Harkortstraße and Floßplatz to the Spießbrücke, where the Floßplatz joins Dufourstraße and Wundtstraße. The line was electrified in 1897 and was used by the Leipzig tram until the 1990s . The track bed of the tram was removed in the course of the expansion of the B 2.
Like the music district and parts of the Südvorstadt, the buildings on the Floßplatz were also badly damaged by the air raids in World War II.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Raft place. In: Leipzig Lexicon. Retrieved May 24, 2020 .
- ↑ Residential and town houses in the Leipzig music district. Musikviertel eV (Ed.), Sax Verlag, Beucha 2007, ISBN 978-3-86729-010-4 , p. 76
literature
- Gina Klank, Gernot Griebsch: Lexicon of Leipzig street names . Edited by Leipzig City Archives , Verlag im Wissenschaftszentrum Leipzig, Leipzig 1995, ISBN 3-930433-09-5 , p. 71
- Hans-Christian Mannschatz: Before the music started playing in the music district . In: The Leipzig Music Quarter . Verlag im Wissenschaftszentrum Leipzig, 1997, ISBN 3-930433-18-4 , p. 9 ff.
- Residential and town houses in Leipzig's music district. Musikviertel eV (Ed.), Sax Verlag, Beucha 2007, ISBN 978-3-86729-010-4 , p. 22