Kurfürstendamm Society
The Kurfürstendamm Society was a stock corporation founded in 1882 to develop the Kurfürstendamm and the Grunewald villa colony .
prehistory
The Kurfürstendamm already existed partly as a stick dam through marshy terrain since 1542 as a connection from the Berlin City Palace to the Grunewald Hunting Lodge .
The Hobrecht plan of 1862 only covered the eastern part of Kurfürstendamm, which was to be expanded as an upscale residential street. At the height of the Black Trench, around today's Olivaer Platz , it led south as a dirt road to Wilmersdorf . According to this plan, the “Churfürsten Damm” represented the southern end of the built-up area, the areas south and west of it were not taken into account. As early as 1865, the city developer Johann Anton Wilhelm von Carstenn had bought the manor Wilmersdorf and Friedenau as well as the Lichterfelde manor in order to establish villa colonies there. Carstenn already had plans to expand the Kurfürstendamm in the direction of Halensee into a boulevard, but they were never realized.
The role of Bismarck
As early as May 18, 1868, Otto von Bismarck wrote a letter to King Wilhelm of Prussia that suggested the expansion of several bridle paths in the west of Berlin, including the one on Kurfürstendamm.
After Bismarck returned to Berlin from Paris (he was ambassador there for a short time in 1862) on the occasion of the establishment of the German Empire in 1871 , he voted against the expansion of the Kurfürstendamm as envisaged in the Hobrecht plan , under the impression of the cityscape of Paris shaped by Georges-Eugène Haussmann as an upscale residential street. In his letter of February 5, 1873 to Wilmowski's Secret Cabinet Councilor, he called for a generous expansion based on the model of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris, since ...
“[…] Fiscal ownership offers an exceptional opportunity for wider and more beautiful streets to develop. […] The street on Kurfürstendamm will become much too narrow according to the existing intentions, since it will probably become a main path for carriages and riders. If you think of Berlin growing as it has before, it will double the population even faster than Paris rose from 800,000 inhabitants to 2,000,000. Then the Grunewald would not be too big for Berlin, for example, the Bois de Boulogne and the main artery of entertainment there, with a width like that of the Elysean Fields. "
He was able to convince Kaiser Wilhelm I with his proposals for the expansion , so that on June 2, 1875, the street width was fixed at 53 meters between the house fronts by cabinet ordinance: 7.5 meters for the front gardens, 4 meters for the sidewalks, 10 each Meters for the lanes and 10 meters for the central promenade with riding branch. The emperor wanted a boulevard that was on a par with the Champs-Élysées and would represent the growing new capital.
John Cornelius Booth
John Cornelius Booth , who in the third generation successfully ran the commercial nursery and tree nursery "James Booth & Sons" in Klein Flottbek near Hamburg, bought 26 hectares of land in 1864 in the area between today's Fasanenstrasse , Lietzenburger , Ranke and Hardenbergstrasse , and one more Run a nursery. Booth continued a legacy of his ancestors of cultivating and planting foreign woody plants. In the course of the 1870s he had planted appropriate plantings on Bismarck's estates in Friedrichsruh in the Sachsenwald . Booth was also the horticultural advisor to Johann Anton Wilhelm von Carstenn, who was one of the initiators of the founding of the Grunewald villa colony. Presumably they already knew each other from Hamburg , where Carstenn had built the Hamburg-Marienthal villa colony from 1857 . Booth was also involved in the development of the villa colonies Lichterfelde-West and Grunewald.
However, since the expansion had to be financed privately, investors first had to be found, which turned out to be difficult because the road initially only led into the as yet unpopulated area of Grunewald. The plans of an English consortium to build a racecourse in the Grunewald and to expand the Kurfürstendamm into a boulevard were unsuccessful despite the support of the emperor. The representative ideas of the monarchy contradicted the profit expectations of the building contractors, who were more interested in large building plots. The road was therefore not expanded until the beginning of the 1880s. Investors could only be found under the condition that a villa colony based on the model of Lichterfelde-West and Westend would be built at the end of Kurfürstendamm . Bismarck recognized this, whereupon his old project “Kurfürstendamm” received intensive support from 1881 onwards.
Kurfürstendamm Society
After the land prices had risen by almost 600 times between 1860 and 1880, Booth, who had a particular interest in the expansion due to his property on Kurfürstendamm, managed to find a consortium under the leadership of Deutsche Bank for the financing. He signed a contract with the royal government in Potsdam in which he undertook to expand the road and received a right of first refusal over 234 hectares of building land in Grunewald for the construction of a villa colony. Shortly after the contract was signed, Booth ceded his rights to Deutsche Bank in return for compensation, which then bought around 15 hectares of land on Kurfürstendamm.
On December 22, 1882, the Kurfürstendamm-Gesellschaft was founded as a stock corporation. The Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft , which later merged to form BHF-Bank , and Deutsche Bank had a decisive share in the company's capital of eight million marks (adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency: around 60 million euros) . Deutsche Bank in turn transferred the rights of the contract as well as the purchased building land to the newly founded company. The first technical director was the building contractor Hugo Hanke , who as a member of the city council was commissioned to negotiate the land in the early 1880s and in return secured the concession to operate a horse-drawn tram on Kurfürstendamm. On January 20, 1883, a contract was signed between him and the city of Charlottenburg.
The purpose of the company was the production of the street Kurfürstendamm and the purchase and sale of properties in the vicinity. To develop the parceled terrain, the company began building a steam tramway in June 1884 , which was opened along with the road on May 5, 1886. The company transferred the management of the railway to Davy, Donath & Co. , which in turn handed it over to the Berlin Steam Tram Consortium in 1888 . 1889-1891 the Kurfürstendamm-Gesellschaft sold its building site on Kurfürstendamm and in Grunewald for a high profit. The company was liquidated in 1892 after construction work was completed. By then it had made 25 million marks. The company's managing director was Paul Jonas from Deutsche Bank. Even Carl Furstenberg of Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft was actively involved in the company. The company's office building, built by Franz Schwechten , was located at Herthastraße 18 in Berlin-Grunewald.
Web links
- The Kurfürstendamm - Boulevard and symbol by Karl-Heinz Metzger (2004)
- Kurfürstendamm-Gesellschaft Luise Berlin District Lexicon Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf
- Karl Helfferich: Georg von Siemens: A picture of life from Germany's great times . Springer, 2013, ISBN 978-3-642-91680-9 , pp. 37 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
literature
- Karl-Heinz Metzger, Ulrich Dunker: The Kurfürstendamm - the life and myth of the boulevard in 100 years of German history . Sabine Konopka Verlag, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-924812-13-6 .
- Paul Voigt, Basic Rent and Housing Issues in Berlin and its Suburbs. An examination of their history and their current state. Part 1, Jena 1901, pp. 218-251.
- Kurfürstendamm-Ges. in liquidation in villa colony Grunewald . In: Yearbook of the Berlin Stock Exchange , Volume 17.1895–96, Berlin 1895, p. 490 digitized
Individual evidence
- ↑ PDF (24.57 MB) of the Deutsche Bauzeitung , Volume 50, p. 444
- ↑ ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: John Cornelius Booth at Luise )
- ^ Arne Hengsbach: The Berlin steam tram. A contribution to the history of transport in the 19th century . In: Böttchers Kleine Eisenbahnschriften . Issue 39.Dortmund, p. 12-14 .
- ^ Wolfgang Kramer, Uwe Kerl: Berlin steam tram 1886–1898 (part 1) . In: Berliner Verkehrsblätter . Issue 1, 2012, p. 3-8 .
- ↑ BHF-Bank image brochure
- ^ Schwechten, Franz: Office building of the Kurfürstendamm Society, Berlin-Grunewald. (From: Hermann Rückwardt, New Villas in the Berlin Area) . Europeana. Retrieved September 7, 2015.