Grand Hotel (Baden)

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The Grand Hôtel around 1890

The Grand Hotel was a luxury hotel in Baden in the canton of Aargau . It was in the spa district on the banks of the Limmat . The hotel was built from 1873 according to plans by the architect Paul Adolphe Tièche and opened at the end of June 1876. With 176 rooms it was the largest hotel in town at the time. It was able to attract a wealthy international clientele with various innovations. For example, in 1882 it was the first building in Baden to be permanently supplied with electrical energy. Numerous celebrities were among the guests. The First World War plunged the Grand Hôtel into a deep crisis, from which it never recovered due to the structural change that had now begun. Shortly after the start of the Second World War , it was closed in September 1939 and finally blown up by the Swiss Army in August 1944 .

Planning and construction

At least since the 14th century, the "back courtyard" had been at the site of the later Grand Hotel. Alongside the “Staadhof”, this spa inn was once the most renowned address in the spa district. By the middle of the 19th century, however, it was well past its prime. The first suggestion for the construction of a new building may have come from Alsatian bathers who no longer wanted to take cures in Baden-Baden after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 . In 1872 the "Neue Kuranstalt AG" was founded with a share capital of CHF 500,000. The board of directors consisted mainly of people from Biel , including National Councilor Albert Locher as president. The only representative from Baden was Joseph Borsinger, the hotelier of the Verenahof . The stock corporation initially acquired the backyard, the adjacent «Mätteli» meadow, the backyard spring and shares in the Grosse Heissen Stein , the Kleiner Heissen Stein and the Limmatquelle . In 1873 she also bought the Staadhof together with the Staadhof Kesselquelle and the Kleine Staadhofquelle . So she owned around a third of the spa district.

An architectural competition was held from July to October 1872 ; the judges were the renowned architects Friedrich Salvisberg , Jakob Friedrich Wanner and Bernhard Simon . Alfred Chiodera won first prize, but his project was not carried out because it was too oversized. Instead, Paul Adolphe Tièche was awarded the contract . Construction work began in autumn 1873, including the removal of the last medieval remains of the "backyard". The planned opening date in the summer of 1875 could not be kept, which was mainly due to problems with the interior design. Despite doubling its share capital, issuing additional bonds, and taking out a mortgage , the company slipped into the red in 1876.

Overall, the construction costs for the hotel, known as the “New Spa”, amounted to around three million francs. Part of the furniture had to be rented for financial reasons. Likewise, Tièche's project could not be fully carried out: There was no money for the east wing, which is why an annex building built in 1860 was left standing and converted into a branch. The planned opening on May 1, 1876 was delayed until the end of June. Due to the ongoing economic crisis after the start-up crash , fewer tourists came than hoped, so that the company was able to continuously reduce losses, but never made a profit. Finally, on March 9, 1885, there was a foreclosure auction . The previous hotel manager acquired the hotel at a comparatively low price of 1,280,823 francs. The "Neue Kuranstalt" was given the new name "Grand Hotel" to underpin its claim to be the first hotel on the square.

Operation, innovations and guests

The architectural style of the Grand Hotel stood at the transition between simple classicism and pompous neo-baroque . Although it was smaller than comparable hotel buildings of the era, the residents of Baden found it ostentatious. The 12th century Epiphany Chapel was originally built close to the hotel . It was demolished because it was in disrepair and replaced in 1882 by a new building by Robert Moser on the opposite side of the street. The hotel company had Parkstrasse built for 50,000 francs, creating a direct connection between the spa district and Baden train station . The “Mätteli”, a park with a dense population of trees, was often a central aspect of advertising campaigns. The hotel also included a laundry, a gardening shop and a truck stop.

Between 100 and 120 people worked in the Grand Hotel with good occupancy. The hotel had a total of 176 rooms and 60 bathrooms. There was also a telegraph office , restaurant, billiard and smoking salons, a dining room for 300 people, a reading and writing salon with a library, and conversation rooms. In addition to the usual single and double rooms, there were also several suites with a salon, bedroom, toilet and servant room. All rooms were heated and equipped with water pipes. The hotel has always endeavored to make the latest technical achievements available to its guests. From the beginning it was equipped with a water ballast elevator from Rieter , one of the first in Switzerland. In May 1882, the hotel manager signed a contract for the joint use of the Oederlin company's hydroelectric power station on the opposite bank of the river. As a result, the hotel was the first building in Baden (and probably in the entire Swiss Central Plateau ) to be permanently supplied with electrical energy.

On June 17, 1879, the dining room was the scene of an important moment in Swiss transport history, when Federal Councilor Emil Welti , the Italian Ambassador Luigi Amedeo Melegari and the German Ambassador Heinrich von Roeder exchanged the ratification documents for the additional contract on the construction and operation of the Gotthard Railway . In 1897 the upper floors of the west wing had to be renewed after a fire. In 1926/27 Emil Vogt renovated the dining room and the entrance hall.

Numerous well-known guests stayed at the Grand Hotel. In the field of politics and the military, these include the former French Empress Eugénie de Montijo (several times in the 1870s and 1880s), the Federal Councilors Emil Welti (1878) and Bernhard Hammer (1890), the Federal Chancellor Gottlieb Ringier (1899) the generals Hans Herzog (1888), Karl von Bülow (1902), Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley (1902), Adolf von Seckendorff (1902), Robert von Massow (1903) and Walter von Schleinitz (1913) as well as the French Prime Minister Charles de Freycinet (1915 ). The writers Gottfried Keller (1886) and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1896) stayed here, as did the painters Arnold Böcklin (1889), Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1896) and Rudolf Koller (1899). The Grand Hotel seems to have been particularly popular with scientists, such as B. the physicians Johann Friedrich Horner (1879), Oskar Liebreich (1880), Rudolf Virchow (1883), Otto Stoll (1898) and Albert Schweitzer (1906), the psychiatrist Gustav Huguenin (1879), the astrophysicist Lewis Morris Rutherfurd (1879 ), the naturalist Louis Lortet (1900), the historians Jacob Burckhardt (1889), Pasquale Villari (1892) and Johann Rudolf Rahn (1897), the physicists Jakob Amsler-Laffon (1881), Marie Curie and Pierre Curie (1898) and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1914), the chemists Hans Heinrich Landolt (1887) and Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt (1890) and the theologian Frédéric Godet (1885). Then there are the museum director Justus Brinckmann (1899), the banker Alphonse de Rothschild (1890), the industrialist Theodor Reinhart (1893) and the film pioneer Louis Lumière (1899).

Years of crisis and the end

Demolition of the Grand Hotel, 1944

In the 1910s, the Swiss tourism industry was at its peak. However, there was an oversupply of hotels, including in Baden. The outbreak of World War I on July 28, 1914 plunged tourism into a serious crisis and the number of guests collapsed. A structural change took place in the interwar period: Swiss customers were increasingly taking the place of foreign visitors, but they were less interested in the glamorous social regimen that had been common up to now. Rather, she used the medical and therapeutic offer, especially since the social insurance paid for the spa stays in whole or in part as a means of rehabilitation and recovery of the workforce. The new orientation resulted in a loss of attractiveness for the traditional well-funded spa public, who now largely stayed away from bathing.

The Grand Hotel, which was considered a relic of the decadent Belle Époque , suffered particularly from structural change . There was an increasing need to save on maintenance and personnel. Thanks to a loan from the Schweizerische Hotel-Treuhand-Gesellschaft (SHTG) founded in 1921, operations could initially be maintained. However, Grand Hotel AG never succeeded in repaying the loans in full. In 1935 she was in arrears with four annual interest rates and came to the conclusion that a reorganization of the company would hardly be promising. The sale of outbuildings in 1936 brought little relief, as the proceeds were urgently needed for repairs and other improvements. In 1937 the SHTG refused to grant another loan. In 1938 the Grand Hôtel was given the addition of "Quellenhof" and tried to attract new customers with a less pretentious appearance.

On September 18, 1939, just under three weeks after the outbreak of World War II , the Grand Hotel closed its doors. It was initially assumed that there would be a seasonal closure. Soon afterwards the rooms of the hotel were requisitioned : the gymnastics room served as a classroom for the children from Ennetbaden , the staff of the 8th Division of the Swiss Army set up offices and used other rooms to spend the night, the car garage served as a stable for horses. It cannot be proven with certainty whether the hotel was also used as refugee accommodation. After further renovation proposals failed, the creditors of Grand Hotel AG saw no future for the unprofitable operation and demanded that the building be demolished. With the sale of the furniture and the recycling of the building materials, the basis for a new, significantly smaller and more modern hotel should be created. On June 18, 1943, the operating company was liquidated.

In the summer of 1944, the emptied hotel served as a training facility for various military units and for fire-fighting exercises for air protection. A dud was also exploded there, which was found after the mistaken bombing of Schaffhausen and brought here. Grenadiers of Fusilier Battalion 251 finally blew up the building on August 18, 1944. In this context, the Institute for Geophysics at ETH Zurich carried out vibration measurements with seismographs . The rubble was then cleared away. The annex building used as a dependance (later the Römerbad ) remained in place for another seven decades and was demolished on January 17, 2017 to make room for a new thermal bath planned by Mario Botta .

literature

Web links

Commons : Grand Hôtel Baden  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. Pp. 20-22.
  2. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. Pp. 26-27.
  3. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. Pp. 27-29.
  4. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. Pp. 30-33.
  5. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. Pp. 33-36.
  6. ^ A b Schaer: City history of Baden. P. 72.
  7. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. Pp. 38-39.
  8. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. P. 47.
  9. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. P. 129.
  10. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. Pp. 51-57.
  11. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. Pp. 84-87.
  12. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. P. 121.
  13. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. P. 39.
  14. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. Pp. 190-195.
  15. ^ Schaer: City history of Baden. P. 80.
  16. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. Pp. 149-152.
  17. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. Pp. 158-160.
  18. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. P. 170.
  19. ^ Müller: The forgotten Grand Hotel. P. 175.

Coordinates: 47 ° 28 ′ 54 "  N , 8 ° 18 ′ 44"  E ; CH1903:  six hundred and sixty-five thousand eight hundred and fifty-five  /  259342