Gronauerwald garden settlement

Around 1900 Alexe Altenkirch showed with her paintings how she imagined the Gronauer Waldsiedlung as an artist.

Drawing by Ludwig Bopp of house 32.

The Gronauerwald garden settlement , usually called the Gronauer Waldsiedlung, is a residential area for workers and employees of the Zanders paper mill that was built at the beginning of the 20th century . It is a district in the Heidkamp district of Bergisch Gladbach .

history

In 1897 Richard Zanders acquired the Gronauer Mühle , which included the 120 acre site that was later named Gronauerwald . In the years that followed, the Gronauerwald garden settlement was gradually built, in which single-family houses with a garden as well as individual multi-family houses and villas were built. Such housing was in demand because it was advantageous for the workers to have short distances to their workplaces, which were and are being created all over the city.

The planning

Like other entrepreneurs, Richard Zanders was also looking for ways to tie workers to his company by creating living space for them or by helping them find housing. During a stay in England he got to know the garden city movement there. In addition, on a trip to the Orient, he developed a building zone regulation in order to be able to operate a certain amount of land reserve management. Together with his wife Anna Zanders , he started planning the Gronauerwald garden settlement. The small private house in a graceful design should also be available to the less well-off. His role model was Alfred Krupp , who had implemented similar plans for "his workers" shortly after the establishment of the Reich . The architect Ludwig Bopp was appointed site manager for the work on site .

Execution

Left the Unterlerbacher Hof, right the houses An der Eiche

View from the Green Path to the Gronauer Waldweg around 1910

One of Bopp's first activities was to demolish the Unterlerbacher Hof, and sometimes one hears the Niederlerbacher Hof, in the Lerbach Palace Park in 1898 . Then translocated he him as the first building in the Gronauer Forest and an office was directed into the holders. It was a two-family house with the designation half-timbered house no.6 . Today it is numbered 32 and 34 as a semi-detached house.

Now Bopp got down to work. First, he developed building plans for a total of 72 houses, which were built one after the other from 1900 to 1906. But not only detached single-family houses were built during this time, but also semi-detached houses. Company apartments were then built as terraced houses and even individual villas. Bopp built one of the first villas for himself. To do this, he chose a spot on Talweg, the property of which reached as far as the Lerbach. The roundabout on the old oak was also created in the first construction phase. Ludwig Bopp was a masterly master of the art of constructing historicist buildings as can be seen all over the city. The best example of this is the town hall on Konrad-Adenauer-Platz. He also showed his skills in the Gronau Forest.

Most of the houses built were owned by the company's workers. Both the city of Bergisch Gladbach and the employer helped with the financing. This made it possible to counteract land speculation on the one hand and to realize Richard Zander's idea of a small house in a graceful design for the less well off on the other . In addition, the JW Zanders company also kept apartments in their possession, which they rented to their own workers.

The further development after the death of Richard Zanders

With the death of Richard Zanders in 1906, his widow Anna Zanders took on the future development of the Gronauer Waldsiedlung alone. However, Ludwig Bopp was not particularly favored by her. For further construction work in the city of Bergisch Gladbach, she therefore preferred the architects Oskar Lindemann and Peter Will . Lindemann had supported Bopp in various ways in the construction management of large construction projects - such as the town hall - he was killed in August 1914 at the beginning of the First World War .

Anna Zanders recognized that she needed an organization for the maintenance and expansion of the Gronauerwald garden settlement in the future, which would ensure that business would run smoothly and independently of people. At her instigation, the non-profit garden settlement company Gronauerwald mb H. (GGG) was founded on February 22nd, 1913 . With the help of the new company, the aim was to prevent the gradual rise in prices for buildings and land due to frequent changes of ownership, foreclosures and over-indebtedness in mortgages. They also wanted to rule out improper use such as excessive letting to too many tenants on too little space and especially the gradual transfer of the houses into the hands of people who did not live in them themselves. All income had to be used for the development and expansion of the GGG, in particular for the purchase of new land, which one wanted to gradually transfer from the hands of individual private individuals to the property of the whole of the settlers.

By the time GGG was founded in 1913, a total of 81 single-family houses had been built in the Gronau Forest, i.e. only nine more houses since 1906, the year Richard Zanders died. In 1914 the GGG already had 95 members. However, further construction activities came to a standstill due to the First World War. In 1929 the GGG reported that there were 320 houses in the Gronau Forest.

With the transfer of Zanders AG to International Paper in 1989, GGG also became their property. In the course of 1998 all apartments and houses were sold. The GGG no longer exists. If you take a tour of the garden settlement today, you get the impression that the ideals of Anna Zanders, geb. v. Siemens, and Richard Zander's little remains. The settlement has become denser. The former single-family houses have been added on and converted.

Monument protection

In 2010, the city of Bergisch Gladbach issued a memorial area statute for part of the Gronauerwald garden settlement around the An der Eiche square and the Gronauer Waldweg . In addition, the following houses are registered as monuments within this area:

Monument no.	Street	House no.
114	At the oak	1
115	At the oak	2
116	At the oak	3
117	At the oak	4th
118	At the oak	5
119	At the oak	6th
120	At the oak	7th
88	Gronauer Waldweg	28
51	Richard-Zanders-Strasse	29
45	Richard-Zanders-Strasse	47

Outside the monument area, the houses Richard-Zanders-Straße 47 are entered as monument no.45 and Richard-Zanders-Straße 53 as monument no.168 in the list of architectural monuments in Bergisch Gladbach .

swell

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d Herbert Stahl in: Gronau , series of publications by the Bergisches Geschichtsverein Rhein-Berg eV, Volume 51, Bergisch Gladbach 2007, ISBN 978-3-932326-51-6 , pp. 176ff.
^ Gemeinnützige Gartensiedlungsgesellschaft Gronauer Wald mb H., Articles of Association and Building Regulations, version dated December 2, 1932, 2. Purpose and object of the company .

literature

Gronauerwald Berg Gladbach 1900 = 1906, loose-leaf collection of various architectural drawings by the architect Ludwig Bopp
Gemeinnützige Gartensiedlungsgesellschaft Gronauer Wald mb H., without naming the author, development of building and housing in Bergisch Gladbach , second edition, Bergisch Gladbach, 1914
E. Benisch, Gronauerwald garden settlement , Bergisch Gladbach, 1914
Old and new mountain housing estates. Gladbach , without naming the author, Bergisch Gladbach 1929
Gartensiedlungsgesellschaft Gronauerwald mb H., without details of the author, Gartensiedlung Gronauerwald , Bergisch Gladbach, 1937
Hans Leonhard Brenner : Von Schwaben ins Bergisches Land, Ludwig Bopp, the architect of the Bergisch Gladbach town hall , in: Heimat between Sülz and Dhünn, Issue 3, History and Folklore in Bergisch Gladbach and the Surrounding Area, Bergisch Gladbach, 1996, page 20 ff.
Andreas Kaul, models of alternative small apartment construction in the late 19th century using the example of the Gronau forest settlement in Bergisch Gladbach, MS, Bergisch Gladbach, 2006
Michael Werling , Marianne Vogt-Werling: Design guide for the garden settlement Gronauer Wald , 1st edition, Bergisch Gladbach 2011
Dehio, Georg , edited by Claudia Euskirchen, Olaf Gisbertz, Ulrich Schäfer: Handbuch der deutschen Kunstdenkmäler. North Rhine-Westphalia I Rhineland . Deutscher Kunstverlag , 2005, ISBN 3-422-03093-X .
Anton Jux: The Bergisch Botenamt, the history of Bergisch Gladbach up to the Prussian era , published by the Culture Office of the City of Bergisch Gladbach, Bergisch Gladbach 1964

Web links

50.9818 7.12945Coordinates: 50 ° 58 '54.48 " N , 7 ° 7' 46.02" O

[Gronauerwald-1] Herbert Stahl in: Gronau , series of publications by the Bergisches Geschichtsverein Rhein-Berg eV, Volume 51, Bergisch Gladbach 2007, ISBN 978-3-932326-51-6 , pp. 176ff.

[2] Gemeinnützige Gartensiedlungsgesellschaft Gronauer Wald mb H., Articles of Association and Building Regulations, version dated December 2, 1932, 2. Purpose and object of the company .