1959: A gap between houses with a lot of history
Opposite the parish church of St. Paul, there is a gap in the row of houses on Kaiserstraße. It opens up an aisle to the town hall. Of course, the town hall did not even exist when the demolition excavators cut this aisle in 1959. At that time, it was an access road to the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which had just been given a new home on today's Platz der deutschen Einheit. The excavators demolished one of the oldest buildings in the city. On January 16, 1959, the Offenbach-Post ran a wistful headline: "A witness to Offenbach's history falls".
The excavators ate away at a three-storey, broadly positioned house built around 1785, whose first occupant was Prince Heinrich XIII von Reuß-Plauen, a relative by marriage of the princely house of Isenburg, which ruled Offenbach. At that time, Kaiserstraße was still called Kanalstraße. A wide ditch ran through its middle, which was only filled in and planted with trees in 1804.
In 1797, the Frankfurt merchant Kaspar Wilhelm Thurneisen took over the Prinzenhaus. He also owned the land on which St. Paul's Church and its neighboring houses stand today. A Thurneisen daughter married the snuff manufacturer Peter Bernard and moved in with him in the Büsingpalais. A granddaughter became the wife of Offenbach's first mayor Georg Peter d'Orville: two family names with a glittering place in the town's history.
The splendor faded after Offenbach was annexed to the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1816. For a time, the house housed the post office. The stagecoach to Frankfurt could be boarded there twice a day. In 1850, however, it became a commercial building. The Francke & Cranz company produced lampshades, slippers and embroidered travel bags there.
At the end of the 19th century, the house came into the possession of the city. Among other things, it housed the registry office. Dr. Siegfried Guggenheim, who later became an honorary citizen, lived there for a time as a tenant. But for the people of Offenbach, it remained "the Francke House" for decades.
It remained in municipal ownership until 1922. The city no longer needed it; it had bought the Büsingpalais and turned it into the town hall and registry office. The "Sisters of Divine Providence", who ran a small clinic in the neighboring house built in 1905, now took over. The prince's house and the lampshade factory became St. Joseph's Hospital together with the newer neighboring building. Where marriages had previously taken place, there was now a place for giving birth, healing and dying.
The building from 1905 is no longer used as a clinic, but it still stands. Its neighbor from 1785, however, has disappeared without leaving a trace.
Lothar R. Brown