In fact, a fishing settlement stands at the beginning of its development. The town's first solid building was a moated castle surrounded by the River Main.
It was built in the 13th century where Isenburg Castle with its Renaissance façade stands today. Without the river, there would not have been the first conflict with neighboring Frankfurt. Around 1400, the neighboring city repeatedly sought the help of the emperor because shipping in Offenbach was being harassed with customs duties.
The Main had always been an important waterway. Charlemagne already attempted to extend it to the Danube around the year 800. When Albrecht Dürer traveled from Nuremberg to the Netherlands around 1500, he chose the waterway past Offenbach. The 18th century was familiar with the regular traffic of the "market ships", which had connections to the Rhine navigation in Frankfurt and Mainz. When Goethe describes Offenbach in his memoirs, he praises the lively shipping traffic on the Main.
The city's origins lay on the river. It was only because it could not be crossed as a national border that it increasingly developed away from it. It turned away from it completely when a dam was built at the end of the 19th century to prevent frequently devastating floods.
This also created an industrial port, which flourished for a long time but later became increasingly less important. Urban planning now envisages attractive residential development in its place. The city is returning to its river.
The water sports enthusiasts had never left it. There are no longer the river swimming pools that were long part of the riverside scene. But there are still rowing and sailing clubs with a long tradition. In a city on the Main, sport and leisure combine with the water. And this can also be experienced on dry land. The riverbank is accompanied by much-used cycle and promenade paths.
There is no road in Offenbach that does not run along the bottom of an old bed of the Main. When the Main made its breakthrough through the Spessart more than 200,000 years ago, it was able to flow between the Taunus and Odenwald into the smoothly planed basin of an ancient estuary. There is not a single spot in the area that has not been one of the changing courses of the river at some point.
The city and its river are closely connected.