Ackerstrasse church hall
The Kirchsaal Ackerstraße (due to its size often also Evangelical Church Heckinghausen ) is a listed Evangelical church building in the Wuppertal district of Heckinghausen and until 2016 was the largest preaching place of the United Evangelical Church Community of Heckinghausen.
history
The history of the church hall Ackerstraße begins with the establishment of a township of the reformed church Gemarke 1893 in the then much of Wupper fields Lutherans dominated Heckinghausen. With the arrival of many Prussian Lutherans, the Reformed parish district lost its position of supremacy in the heart of Barmen , which was illustrated by the construction of several Lutheran churches in the originally reformed Southeast of Barmer (based on the Old Church of Wupperfeld in 1869, the Church of Peace , 1872 the St. John's Church , 1911 the Luther Church and finally the Church of the Resurrection in 1930 ). The Reformed community of Gemarke countered this development with the construction of a church service hall with an extensive community center near the Heckinghauser center, which the Barmer architect Gerhard August Fischer was commissioned to carry out . After a year of construction, the new community complex was ceremoniously opened on May 9, 1894, and after just a few months the unofficial name Reformed Church Heckinghausen was used instead of the official name Kirchsaal Ackerstraße , thanks to its particularly stately design.
During the air raids on Barmen , the church hall was badly hit by incendiary bombs, which severely damaged the substance of the building and the interior fittings and windows were irredeemably destroyed. Parish priest Kuhlmann only barely escaped death that night, as the rectory at Krautstrasse 74, an integral part of the building complex, was also badly hit and burned to the ground. The restoration work began shortly after the end of the war and was completed in 1949, the work was entrusted to the Wuppertal architect Adolf Schröder. The reconstruction work on the rectory on Krautstrasse continued until 1951.
In 1984 the Reformed Congregation Heckinghausen was merged with the Lutheran congregation (former Johanniskirchengemeinde) and restructured under the name United Evangelical Church Congregation Heckinghausen . The Kirchsaal Ackerstraße is now the preaching place of the second district, services take place every second and fifth Sunday of the month, all other services in the Paul-Gerhardt-Haus of the former Lutheran congregation; in addition, the Church of the Resurrection on Norrenberg is used as an isolated sermon site in the third parish. In October 1991 and again in June 1993 the presbytery of the community decided in a nationally sensational action to grant church asylum to several asylum seekers in the Ackerstrasse church hall, who were admitted there. This event was for the first time in Wuppertal. On April 4, 1994, ARD broadcast the Easter service throughout Germany from the Ackerstraße church hall, and on May 9, the 100th anniversary of the church hall was celebrated with a large community festival.
In 2014, rumors began to circulate that the community leadership was planning to sell the building complex. These considerations were confirmed in spring 2016 when the community officially announced that it would give up the church hall as a place of worship in favor of the newly renovated Paul Gerhardt House. Before that, it had only been used in summer for several years because of its ailing and almost unusable heating system, and every autumn a small procession was held on the occasion of the move to the Paul-Gerhardt-Haus over the winter. The church hall was in urgent need of renovation and the heating system also suffered severe damage to the boiler in recent months, the repair costs of which the community could no longer bear. The last service took place on October 30, 2016, the first farewell service was held for the summer and for the move to the Paul-Gerhardt-Haus in June. The building has been sold and is now privately owned.
Building description
The building is a multi-storey brick building in the neo-Gothic style . The church hall on the east side is twenty meters long, sixteen meters wide and with the choir facing east. The church hall, which corresponds to a hall church , is located on the ground floor of the building, which is built on a north-south slope, while the basement contained a sexton's apartment and the boiler rooms. The hall is structured by five bays with pointed arched windows and ends with a flat wall. In the gable of the gable roof, which is also pointed in the inner room, there is a circular rose window, which is the only window in the church with a colorful design; all other windows are completely unadorned and simple according to Reformed custom. The windows originally had very finely crafted tracery , but this was not restored after the war. A wooden gallery running around three sides allows a view of the pulpit area from all sides, and the pews in the lower area are also aligned with the pulpit in the Reformed manner.
The three-storey part of the building with the community halls is in front of the building facing west towards Ackerstrasse. The two-part, smaller windows are also surrounded by clear, pointed arches made of brick, which lend the rather bulky building a significant amount of height. On the ground floor there is a spacious foyer wing and a kitchen with toilet. In addition to the entrance on the north side of Krautstrasse, this foyer tract has another entrance on the south side of the building in a two-storey low-rise building added in 1928. The community halls were on the first floor and the rooms for confirmation work in the foyer tract. In addition to the electrical systems, the municipal archive was also located on the upper floor.
Remarkable
It is noteworthy that the Ackerstraße church hall to this day (as of July 2017) is the only church building of the formerly Reformed tradition that fell victim to the wave of closings in the Wuppertal church district. Until the closing of the church hall in October 2016, it was exclusively Lutheran and Uniate church buildings that were abandoned as preaching sites in Wuppertal, which was clearly reformed, despite complete community associations (with the exception of the two communities in Ronsdorf ). The only exception is the Immanuelskirche (closed in 1984), where monthly services are still held today.
As an example of the neo-Gothic architecture of the time, the building has been a listed building since July 15, 1994 .
literature
- Sigrid Lekebusch, Florian Speer (eds.): Churches and places of worship in Barmen , Wuppertal 2008, ISBN 978-3-87707-721-4
- Association of Evangelical Churches in the district of Wupperfeld, Fritz Mehnert (Ed.): Oberbarmer Gemeindegeschichte , Wuppertal 2002
Web links
- Entry in the Wuppertal monument list
- United Evangelical Church Congregation Heckinghausen
Individual evidence
- ↑ Community history online on the website of the Evangelical Church Community of Heckinghausen, accessed on July 13, 2017
- ↑ “Parish live” December 2016 and January 2017 - Parish letter of the Ver. Ev. Heckinghausen parish, “Farewell to the Church Hall” pp. 10–12
Coordinates: 51 ° 16 '8.9 " N , 7 ° 13' 27.7" E