Salmenstein's house

The Salmenstein house

Location of the Salmenstein house on the city wall at the Fischerfeld

The Salmenstein house was part of the late medieval Frankfurt city fortifications . It existed from around 1350 to 1810 and was located on the city wall to Fischerfeld , on today's Rechneigrabenstrasse in the southeastern city center.

The Salmenstein house on the top of the wall

During the construction of the Gothic city wall after the second city expansion approved by Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian in 1333, a two-story house with a slate-covered hip roof and two turrets with pointed domes was built around 1350 on the top of the wall in the area of today's Rechneigrabenstrasse . The basement of the house was made of stone, the upper floor in half-timbering . The lower edge of the building protruding over the wall was decorated with a Gothic round arch frieze. As with most of the smaller constructions of the city fortifications, the name of the building probably goes back to the surname of a guard or tower keeper living here . The surname Salmensteyn is mentioned several times in city documents from the 14th century.

To the west of the Salmenstein house, the Gothic city wall ran at right angles to the Romanesque Staufen wall . From 1462 to 1806, this was the southern end of Frankfurt's Judengasse , Frankfurt's Jewish ghetto. The Jewish cemetery had been located north of Salmenstein's house since the Middle Ages , and to the east of the house was the All Saints' bulwark and the bastion of the city fortifications called Jewish bulwark .

When the city wall was expanded into a fortress in the Dutch style , which Johann Wilhelm Dilich carried out between 1627 and 1667, the house was retained. It imprinted itself as a landmark in memory of the Frankfurt one, even after the demolition of the walls in the early 19th century. As part of the razing, the house was probably demolished around 1810.

Small town hall tower

Town hall tower ensemble as seen from the main tower , 2009

When the Frankfurt city hall complex was to be expanded by a new building at the end of the 19th century , the architects Franz von Hoven and Ludwig Neher were inspired by the towers of the Frankfurt city fortifications when designing the two city hall towers. The large town hall tower, soon popularly named after the tall mayor at the time, Franz Adickes Langer Franz , was designed based on the model of the Sachsenhausen bridge tower , which was demolished in 1769 . The small town hall tower, named Kleiner Cohn after an anti-Semitic hit popular at the time , was a true copy of Salmenstein's house. However, nothing of this has been seen since the destruction of the Second World War : the town hall towers burned down in an air raid on March 22, 1944 and were only given temporary roofs after the war. A faithful reconstruction has been considered since 1984, but no concrete measures have been taken. In 2017, on the basis of a joint budget proposal from the CDU, SPD and Greens, the city council commissioned the magistrate with a cost analysis for a complete reconstruction of the two town hall towers. In an interim report from June 2018, the magistrate put the possible cost of rebuilding the tower roofs at six million euros.

literature

Architects & Engineers Association (Ed.): Frankfurt am Main and its buildings . Self-published by the association, Frankfurt am Main 1886
Georg Hartmann, Fried Lübbecke (Ed.): Alt-Frankfurt. A legacy . Sauer and Auvermann publishing house, Glashütten 1971
Fried Lübbecke : The face of the city. According to Frankfurt's plans by Faber, Merian and Delkeskamp. 1552-1864 . Waldemar Kramer publishing house, Frankfurt am Main 1952

Individual evidence

50.111387 8.690611Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 41 ″ N , 8 ° 41 ′ 26.2 ″ E

[1] Joint budget proposal of the CDU, SPD and GRÜNEN parliamentary groups for the 2017 product budget (PDF)

[2] Municipal report B188 (PDF)