Roßmarkt (Frankfurt am Main)
| Rossmarkt | |
|---|---|
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 View from the main tower |
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| Basic data | |
| place | Frankfurt am Main |
| District | Downtown |
| Created | middle Ages |
| Confluent streets | Kaiserstrasse , Grosse Gallusstrasse, Junghofstrasse, Goetheplatz , An der Hauptwache |
| Buildings | Englischer Hof (†), U60311 |
The Roßmarkt is a square in the city center of Frankfurt am Main . The Kaiserstraße flows into the Roßmarkt from the southwest , the Große Gallusstraße from the west and the Am Salzhaus street from the southeast . To the north, the Roßmarkt merges into Goetheplatz , and at the eastern end into Platz An der Hauptwache . The Katharinenpforte also branches off here . The Katharinenkirche , built between 1678 and 1681 and today the main Protestant church of the city, dominates this part of the square, while the Johannes Gutenberg monument dominates in the west .
history
middle Ages
In the early Middle Ages, the Roßmarkt was an open field outside the city fortifications, the so-called Staufen wall . The Bockenheimer Pforte , later called Katharinenpforte , was one of the three city gates that led into the city. In 1332, Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian allowed the city of Frankfurt to expand. Since then, the area within the Staufen wall has formed the old town , while the expansion area enclosed by a newly built wall, to which the Roßmarkt also belonged, was called the new town . The New Town was a sparsely populated area for a long time, with numerous courtyards and gardens up until the nineteenth century. The Roßmarkt also remained unpaved until the 17th century. Thousands of horses were sold here every year; The largest customer was the postmaster general from the Thurn und Taxis company . The Merian plan from 1628 shows a large horse pond and a series of stakes to leash the animals. In bad weather the place turned into a swamp. In order to secure the traffic connection between Bockenheim and the old town, the council had a paved path built north of the Roßmarkt, the Steinweg. Soon numerous inns settled in the area around the Roßmarkt. The spacious square was also used for knight games, the last time in 1658.
17th and 18th centuries
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Roßmarkt served as one of the four execution sites in Frankfurt am Main . Among the most famous delinquents who lost their heads here in 1616 were the rebel Vinzenz Fettmilch and eight of his cronies. In 1772 the maid Susanna Margaretha Brandt , the model for Goethe's Gretchen , was killed by the sword on the nearby square next to the main guard station . In 1799 the last public execution in Frankfurt took place on the Roßmarkt. A master stoner was beheaded for the murder of his wife.
Numerous flying sales stalls, especially for pottery from the Kannenbäckerland and Franconia , aroused the discontent of the city authorities. In 1666, the council had the square planted with trees and a row of identically built row houses built on the square to the north , the so-called new houses . Some of them even survived the war destruction of 1944, but were then expropriated and demolished in order to widen the square.
At the end of the 18th century, the older houses on the north and south edges of the Roßmarkt disappeared and were replaced by new buildings in the then modern classicist style . One of the first was the French Reformed Church , built from 1789 to 1792 in the west of the Roßmarkt. It was destroyed in 1944 and never rebuilt.
Their plans came from the French architect Nicolas Alexandre Salins de Montfort , who also created two other new buildings on Roßmarkt: the famous Englischer Hof , built in 1797, and the Palais de Neufville opposite, built in 1799 with its semicircular courtyard. Further east on the corner of the Katharinenpforte was the Palazzo Belli , built in 1755 by the Lombard wine merchant Josef Maria Belli , next to it the house of the Golden Fountain , in which Catharina Elisabeth Goethe spent the last 13 years of her life from 1795. In her letters she wrote that the square in front of her house undoubtedly offered the best view of all of Frankfurt .
19th and 20th centuries
In 1816 the merchant and art collector Johann Friedrich Städel donated his collection and his house on Roßmarkt in a will for the Städelsche Kunstinstitut .
The middle part of the Roßmarkt has been called Goetheplatz since 1844 because the Goethe Memorial created by Ludwig Schwanthaler was located here . From the Second World War until the end of January 2007 it stood further west in the Taunusanlage . After its restoration, it returned to its original location on August 13, 2007.
The northern part of the Roßmarkt was called Comoedienplatz or Theaterplatz since 1780 , after the city theater built by Johann Andreas Liebhardt in 1780 . Before the theater was built, theater was only performed on makeshift stages or in tents in Frankfurt. The old city theater was demolished in 1904 after the new theater was built. During the Weimar Republic, the square was named Rathenauplatz after the Reich Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, who was murdered by nationalist and anti-Semitic terrorists in 1922 . During the National Socialist period from 1933 to 1945 it was called Horst-Wessel-Platz .
The Gutenberg monument , a work by the sculptor Eduard Schmidt von der Launitz from 1854 to 1858, still stands on the southern Roßmarkt today . It was carried out using the electroforming technique developed by the Frankfurt physicist Rudolf Christian Böttger , which was new at the time . The three figures of Gutenberg, Schöffer and Fust stand on a pillar, at the corners are allegories of the four sciences ( theology , philosophy , medicine , law ) and embodiments of the four first printing cities of Mainz , Venice , Strasbourg and Frankfurt am Main .
Until 1872 you could only leave the Roßmarkt to the west via Große Gallusstraße. In the south, the extensive gardens of the White Stag and the von Cronstetten women's monastery closed off the square. From 1872 to 1876, the breakthrough in Kaiserstraße was created here , which created a connection from Roßmarkt to Frankfurt's western train stations via Kaiserplatz .
At the end of the 19th century, the classicist buildings on Roßmarkt were largely demolished and replaced by new historicist buildings. The largest of them was the representative bank building of Disconto-Gesellschaft , built in 1904 . The building was taken over by Deutsche Bank AG in 1929 and was the company's headquarters from 1957 to 1984.
In the 20th century the Roßmarkt developed into a focal point for urban traffic. Several tram lines , including the suburban lines of Frankfurter Lokalbahn AG , ran across the Roßmarkt. It was not until 1978 when the tram on the Zeil was shut down that the tram tracks disappeared from the eastern part of Roßmarkt, and in 1986 from the southern area with the opening of the U6 and U7 underground lines .
The Roßmarkt today
The destruction caused by the bombing of Frankfurt of the Second World War and the reconstruction have changed the Roßmarkt significantly. In the 1960s, a pedestrian underpass was built to decouple pedestrian traffic from road traffic. However, it was never accepted and closed again in the early 1990s due to vandalism . In 1998, the Techno Club U60311 , which has won several architecture prizes , was opened in the former underpass according to plans by the Frankfurt architect Bernd Mey , named after the postcode of Frankfurt city center.
Since the end of 2006 there has been an underground car park for 600 parking spaces under Goetheplatz . Your entrance is a glass pavilion on the Roßmarkt on the border with Goetheplatz. As part of this project, the Gutenberg monument was renovated and the Goethe monument returned to its original location on Goetheplatz. The redesign of the square, based on a design by the Berlin landscape architect Gabriele G. Kiefer , was completed on June 1, 2008 .
During the European Football Championship in 2008 , the Roßmarkt was closed to public viewing . You could watch all the games of the EM there for free. This offer also existed for the 2010 World Cup .
literature
- Fried Lübbecke : The face of the city. Based on Frankfurt plans by Faber, Merian and Delkeskamp 1552–1864 . Waldemar Kramer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-7829-0276-9 .
Web links
- City Planning Office ( Memento from April 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- Current plan
- The Roßmarkt at altfrankfurt.com
Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 44.2 " N , 8 ° 40 ′ 36" E