Fritz Bockhorn

Fritz Bockhorn (* 1871 ; † May 1942 ) was a Swiss politician and businessman .

Life

Fritz Bockhorn was born the tenth of eleven children and completed a commercial apprenticeship in Zurich in 1887 . After a short time in Burgdorf , he returned to Albisrieden , where he began mining gravel as an entrepreneur near today's Hardplatz and trading in land.

The passionate hunter was also involved in village politics: at the age of 22, he was serving as justice of the peace . A little later he was elected municipal administrator. 1901–1904 he was also a member of the Cantonal Council for Albisrieden . At Triemlistrasse 11, he had an Art Nouveau house built, the "Annaburg". In 1897 he married Anna Wydler, who, like the first child, died shortly after birth. In 1900 he married her sister, Rosa (Rosina) Wydler (1880–1954). Their first child also died in the summer of 1901. Alicy, born in 1905, remained the only child.

Around this time the Bockhorn were among the two richest families in Albisried. After the gravel at Hardplatz had been exhausted, he had the pit filled with the abundant excavation in Zurich against payment. Filled, overgrown and partly built on, the property was registered on Alyce, who sold it to the city of Zurich in 1930 at a top price. Then he opened a new gravel pit further out of town near the Herderen. With his keen sense of speculation, he bought other properties in Albisrieden, Schlieren, Urdorf and elsewhere at reasonable prices. His properties on the outskirts of Zurich increased their value ten to twenty times by the time he died. When the bricklayers' strike from Zurich was to be carried to Albisrieden in 1905, he ensured peace and order. Around 1910 he was more feared than popular and no longer appeared in any political function.

In 1924 the couple initially moved to Lugano together and after a short time back to the canton of Zurich, to Kilchberg.

The fact that the “women's fortune” from Rosa's family was only allocated after about 30 years annoyed Bockhorn, so that in his will he only awarded his wife a small pension. In 1932 he separated from his wife, left Kilchberg in order to keep moving in disputes with the tax authorities: 1933 to Lugano-Massagno, from there to Viganello, then to Zug and finally to Dietlikon. The gravel pit in the Hardgrund area became a Kies- und Sandwerke AG, and in the 1940s Henry Schoch figured as the sole entrepreneur of further gravel and sand works as well as a cement pipe factory.

In 1941 cancer suddenly broke out and Fritz Bockhorn died in May of the following year.

family

In 1928 his daughter Alicy married the four years older businessman Henry Schoch from Zurich, whom Bockhorn accepted into the business. At Restelbergstrasse 106, Bockhorn had a house built for the young couple, and he had it registered for the son-in-law. Schoch soon fell ill and was permanently bedridden.

As a result of his will, his daughter Alicy, who had been chased out of the house by her husband in 1953, had to endure a 12-year inheritance dispute with his brother after his death in 1954; after the death of her mother in 1965, she agreed to a division agreement. In 1985 she used the assets to set up the Alice Schoch Bockhorn Foundation.

Web links

• Alice Schoch-Bockhorn, a picture of life