Untermainkai
| Untermainkai | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Basic data | |
| place | Frankfurt am Main |
| District | Old town , city center , Bahnhofsviertel , Gutleutviertel |
| Created | 19th century |
| Connecting roads | Mainkai (east), Speicherstrasse (west) |
| Cross streets | Hofstrasse, Neue Mainzer Strasse , Untermainbrücke , Untermainanlage , Mainluststrasse, Holbeinsteg , Windmühlstrasse, Unter der Friedensbrücke , Wiesenhüttenstrasse |
| Technical specifications | |
| Street length | ~ 1,100 meters |
The Untermainkai is quite mainische quayside in the Frankfurt districts Old Town , downtown , Bahnhofsviertel and Gutleutviertel . It connects to the old town Mainkai in the east and continues in the west in the Gutleutviertel beyond the Friedensbrücke from Speicherstrasse towards Westhafen . The left Main equivalent is the Schaumainkai .
location
The street begins in the east in the old town at the level of Seckbächer Gasse or the former Degussa area , which is currently being completely redeveloped under the project name Maintor . The course through the old town ends after around 120 meters at the intersection of Hofstraße , Neuer Mainzer Straße and Untermainbrücke . This is followed by a 200 meter long section through the city center to the Untermainanlage .
In the adjoining Bahnhofsviertel , Untermainkai is the only road to the river. It is regularly intersected by Mainluststrasse , Holbeinsteg , Windmühl - and finally Wiesenhüttenstrasse , which also represents the transition into the Gutleutviertel . There are no other cross streets up to the Friedensbrücke , where the transition from Untermainkai to Speicherstraße takes place.
The road has three lanes throughout and plays a central role in the distribution of individual traffic on the right and left of the Main, in particular thanks to the Untermain and Friedensbrücke bridges. To the south, below the steeply sloping former quay walls, there is the Nizza , a park of over 4 hectares , over almost the entire length . Since the term Nice is not as widespread as that of Untermainkais as a street name, the latter name is often (incorrectly) used synonymously for the park.
history
Imperial city time
(excerpt from a copper engraving by Matthäus Merian the Elder )
In the Middle Ages and the early modern period , only the short section of what is now Untermainkai , which today runs in the Altstadt district , was within the Frankfurt city fortifications . Across the full width between what is now Neuer Mainzer Strasse and the Untermainanlage , the particularly strong western flank of the defenses from the so-called Mainzer Bollwerk moved north from the Main bank . The bank itself was followed by a high wall, on the back of which in the area of the Untermainkai the houses of the Alte Mainzer Gasse were built.
The Mainz bulwark, which was partially set into the Main and directly in front of the wall with a hill in front, did not allow a quay or harbor at this point. Therefore, one extended east of it, in the area of today's Main Quay, roughly from the level of the Carmelite monastery up to the Leonhardskirche , which was used as a wine market . There, ships cleared their duties there and finally unloaded their cargo even from places as far away as Strasbourg .
One of the largest field estates outside the walls of the city was the gallows field , which stretched west from this to the Galluswarte and south of the current Kettenhofweg down to the Main - the area of the later Bahnhofsviertel and of large parts of the Gallus as well as smaller parts of the Gutleutviertel and the Westend . It was named after the former Frankfurter Hochgericht , which was located roughly at the current intersection of Taunusstrasse and Moselstrasse . In the 18th century the reference to the gallows was increasingly felt to be offensive and the name was changed to Gallus , as was the case with Galgengasse, Galgentor and Galgenwarte.
As the oldest topographical representations of the urban area from the early 17th century show, there were already a number of summer villas with large landscaped gardens on the later Untermainkai in front of the city walls. The area was probably particularly popular because of its favorable climatic location. After a striking windmill, the area was not known as Untermainkai, but as An der Windmühle .
In the 18th century the construction companies of the urban upper class increased significantly, over 500 requests of this kind were recorded between 1720 and 1800 alone. Until the end of the century, the buildings, always pushed close to the bank, expanded to around today's Friedensbrücke . In terms of depth, it roughly corresponded to the area between the later Untermainkai and Gutleutstrasse .
19th century to World War II
After the consolidation in the early 19th century, i.e. the demolition of almost all city walls and towers, the Untermainkai was also designated as building land soon after 1818. The backfilling of the Mainz bulwark , which extends into the river, is the reason for the offset in the development of the banks of the Main , which has remained visible to this day and still marks the transition from Mainkai to Untermainkai. In the 1820s, ten classicist houses were built right down to the new Untermainanlage , where the Untermaintor was built as the new city gate .
( steel engraving by Wilhelm Lang based on a template by Jakob Fürchtegott Dielmann )
( steel engraving )
Five were built east of the newly laid out Neue Mainzer Straße leading to the north in the area of the old town and attached to older buildings on Alte Mainzer Gasse . Another five were built west of Neue Mainzer Straße in the area of the Untermainanlage. At this time the name of the Untermainkai as a street came up for the first time, although the purely topographical differentiation between Upper and Lower Main was already known in the Middle Ages . The construction followed the overall plan of the then city architect Johann Georg Christian Hess to give the entire bank of the Main a uniform, classical appearance.
(photography by Carl Friedrich Mylius )
Throughout the 19th century, up to the subdivision of the Bahnhofsviertel in the 1880s, the bank section west of the Untermaintor was not known as Untermainkai, but as An der Windmühle . This was due to a historical windmill located directly in front of the gate on the bank, which was already based on a city view by Matthäus Merian the Elder. Ä. from around 1618 can be recognized.
In 1832, the innkeeper Johann Georg Ried built the "Mainlust" garden restaurant in its place, which gained a legendary reputation in the following decades and found its way into numerous even international travel descriptions, although it was demolished in 1873. A replacement building, the “Neue Mainlust”, erected further west at the same time, had barely existed for two decades and could no longer build on the fame of the previous building. Even today, the name of the Windmühlstraße reminds of the windmill and thus indirectly the Mainlust, but both could be located at the height of today's Mainluststraße .
In 1839–1850, the previous buildings of today's main station were built on the former gallows field, now Gallusfeld, west of the Gallusanlage with the western train stations . For the Main-Neckar Railway , a new crossing of the Main was built on the site of today's Friedensbrücke with the Main-Neckar Bridge for the first time since the end of the imperial city period. This established the later and still present western border of the Lower Main Quay.
The embankment of the "Little Main" between the Mühlinsel and the Mainlust made it possible in 1858 to set up a quay extending deeper into the Main between the Leonhardskirche and the Windmühlstrasse. But the ongoing industrialization threatened to have a lasting impact on the noble character of classicist urban planning, which had been praised a few years earlier. From 1859, from the new winter harbor established in the same year to the west of the Main-Neckar bridge at that time, the tracks of the urban connecting railway stretched eastward along the banks of the Main, followed by unsightly storage sheds.
The then very old city gardener Sebastian Rinz , who had led the conversion of the old fortifications into the ramparts , was able to ensure that a large part of the storage sheds in the area of the Lower Main Quay disappeared again. Under his successor, Andreas Weber , a green promenade was built south of the Uferstrasse with the Nice as an extension of the Frankfurt ramparts from 1860–1880 . After the construction of the Untermainbrücke in 1872–1874 and the main canalisation from 1883–1886, the Untermainkai had largely received its current shape towards the bank.
Until the founding of the empire , practically nothing changed on the city side compared to the state of the early 19th century, despite the change of the bank. Only the construction of the main train station marked the beginning of the planned development of the former Gallusfeld, and thus also the city side of the Untermainkais. Individual houses were built in the 1870s at the transition from late classicism to early neo-renaissance , the majority was built between 1880 and 1900. Up to Windmühlstrasse they replaced the country houses and gardens that were still in existence to date. On the site of the former Main-Neckar station which found International Electrotechnical Exhibition in 1891 instead.
According to the situation, the new buildings of the late 19th century were representative upper-class houses in the rich mixed forms of historicism that were common at the time . While the construction of the closed block edge dominated in the east , an open, spacious villa construction was more common in the west. In many cases, only older house systems were expanded there. However, the newly moved Wilhelm-Leuschner-Straße cut up all the gardens and parks facing Gutleutstraße and reduced them considerably with the subsequent development. Shortly before the First World War , the bank development was completed around 1910.
Post-war to the present
The damage caused by the air raids on Frankfurt am Main in the Second World War was relatively low on Untermainkai, measured in terms of the total degree of destruction and the proximity to the old town . Of the first ten houses, exactly half of the houses 4 ( Hermann-Schlosser-Haus ) and 12–15 were preserved. Today they are among the earliest and most important examples of Frankfurt classicism and the oldest town houses in the old and inner city . From an urban development point of view, the redensification is more important in the western part, especially beyond Windmühlenstraße .
Large buildings from the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the InterContinental Frankfurt and the Union Investment high-rise , isolated demolitions as well as new buildings extending deep south into the parcels on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Strasse or parking lots have the character of Untermainkai there compared to that of the pre-war period changed.
With the parks belonging to the former villas, some of which took up a third of entire street blocks and had centuries-old trees, the formerly alley-like , upper-class character has given way to a thoroughfare. The only thing that has been preserved in the overall context is the Villa Bonn , which is still baroque at its core , even if it was redesigned in a classical style and from the Wilhelminian era, and which for historical reasons never had a large park.
Over the next few years, the Maintor project , which envisages a complete redevelopment of the areas between Weißfrauenstrasse , Seckbächer Gasse , Main and Neuer Mainzer Strasse , will also completely change the oldest section of Untermainkai. On the one hand, the area, which had served Degussa as a closed company site for more than a century , will be open to the public again and the original course of the Alte Mainzer Gasse towards the Neue Mainzer Straße will be restored. On the other hand, the high-rise project in Frankfurt am Main will move into the old town for the first time.
buildings
House numbers from 4 to 84 are currently assigned on Untermainkai, but these are divided between only 20 individual structures, mainly for historical reasons, and some have large gaps. As on all riverside streets, the odd and even house numbers are assigned in direct sequence and in the direction of flow of the Main, i.e. from east to west. The corner buildings on cross streets are numbered to these and not to the Untermainkai.
In the oldest section up to Neue Mainzer Straße , due to the Maintor project with Untermainkai 4, only the Hermann-Schlosser-Haus, which was built in 1823 according to a design by the then city architect Johann Friedrich Christian Hess , is currently located . The demolished Degussa buildings from the 1950s previously claimed house numbers 1–3, and it is not yet known how they will be re-allocated after completion.
The area across the Neue Mainzer Straße through the city center includes four buildings in the south of the Untermainanlage , Untermainkai 12–15 . These are also still classicist in essence and from the 1820s, but were partly changed later in a historical or modern way. As with the Hermann-Schlosser-Haus, the authorship goes back to Johann Friedrich Christian Hess. Houses 14 and 15 contain part of the Frankfurt Jewish Museum ; an extension to the Untermainanlage is planned.
Right on the border between the city center and the station district , Untermainkai 17 is the location of the “Main Nizza” restaurant, which was built in 2004 in a modern style on the site of the old Grindbrunnen. Flanked by a double staircase, it opens up the green space, which is named after the town in southern France because of the existing vegetation . This accompanies the Untermainkai to the Friedensbrücke with the nationally known plane tree avenue as well as play and sports facilities over the full length.
The following two street blocks, now in the station district, were built on in the imperial era in the manner of the closed block edge. A house destroyed in the war replaces the Untermainkai 19 building, which was built in the typical style of post-war modernism . The following building, Untermainkai 20 , which was built in 1875 and is a listed building, is a typical representative of the late transition from classicism to neo-renaissance in Frankfurt . It was only thirty years later that the Untermainkai 21 building, which is also listed today, was built in 1906 in an Art Nouveau style , which is rare in Frankfurt am Main .
To the west of Windmühlstrasse is the Untermainkai 23-25 building , which was erected in 1950 for the Deutsche Verkehrs- und Kreditbank instead of three buildings destroyed in the war . The architecture, which is more reminiscent of buildings from the 1930s, is unusual for the time it was built, which is due to the fact that the design goes back to the then retired building officer Josef Bischof . How houses 24 and 25 once looked can still be seen from the preserved and listed building Untermainkai 26 , built in 1876 , which once formed three identical row houses with them.
The palatial twin house Untermainkai 27/28 was also built in 1876 and still in the same noble style on the border between late classicism and neo-renaissance . Immediately afterwards, but erected at a long time lag in 1894, follows with the palatial neo-baroque semi-detached house Untermainkai 29/30, a typical representative of the late local historicism, which was finally detached from the local building tradition. Both semi-detached houses are under monument protection and can be counted among the best preserved and most representative representatives of their respective epochs in the city. The building Untermainkai 31 , which closes the street block on Untermainkai, can only be dated to the early 1890s in a critical way due to a lack of tradition.
literature
- Tobias Picard: Living, living and working on the river. The banks of the Main in the 19th and 20th centuries in pictures and photographs. In: Dieter Rebentisch and Evelyn Hils-Brockhoff on behalf of the Gesellschaft für Frankfurter Geschichte e. V. in connection with the Institute for City History (Ed.): Archive for Frankfurt's History and Art. Volume 70, Verlag Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-7829-0559-8 , pp. 289-325.
- City of Frankfurt am Main, Department of Planning and Economics, City Surveying Office, Department of Culture and Science, Institute for City History (Ed.): My Frankfurt >> Historical Maps. CD-ROM. City Survey Office Frankfurt am Main / Institute for Urban History, Frankfurt am Main 2007.
