2015: Conversion of Stadthof completed
Step by step, the confines of the Stadthof are easing. The construction fences are receding. They demarcate smaller and smaller areas. New slabs already cover most of the Stadthof. "It's about time they came to an end," sighs the waitress at the café pavilion. Only a few pedestrians are still crossing the areas that have been cleared.
City courtyard. The courtyard of the city. How graceful that looks next to the pathos with which the neighbor appears as the "Square of German Unity". The Stadthof once got its name because it was the courtyard behind the "Stadthaus". This stood on Frankfurter Straße and served as Offenbach's town hall from 1858 to 1921. In the early years, the administration of the Offenbach district was also based on the upper floor.
The town hall on Frankfurter Straße overlooked Aliceplatz and bore this name even before the city acquired it as its administrative headquarters in 1858. It was the town house of the princely Eisenburg court, after the old palace on the Main had become too uncomfortable for the high nobility. They had been residing in a town residence, their "Stadthaus", since around 1760.
Some Offenbach residents still remember what it looked like before the administration moved into its new town hall at the Stadthof in 1972. How on the brutally warm July 10 of that year, several thousand Offenbach residents celebrated the completion of the building with the Minister President Albert Oswald. The celebrants stood where they had found parking spaces under trees just a few months earlier.
Georg Dietrich was the name of the Lord Mayor who was the first to take office in the new town hall. Some people found it remarkable that he had placed his desk in such a way that the mayor had the Chamber of Industry and Commerce behind him as he studied the files.
The neighboring IHK had stood on the site of a school that had been bombed during the war since 1957. The "Oberrealschule am Stadthof", built in 1873, was the mother of the two grammar schools Leibniz and Rudolf-Koch-Schule. When it was bombed, the city administration lost an emergency home. It had moved into the building after the Büsingpalais, which had been used as the town hall since 1921, was destroyed in an air raid. The "Stadthaus" with the house number Frankfurter Straße 31 overlooking Aliceplatz had also become a ruin.
Today there is a clear view of the town hall from Aliceplatz.
There will also still be Offenbach residents who listened to the packed Stadthof in the gray post-war period when the legendary SPD chairman Kurt Schumacher so passionately attacked his opponent Konrad Adenauer. He spoke in front of the fire station, which had survived the war and only disappeared in 1962. Where today the mayor of Offenbach leafs through files, fire hoses once dried.
The Stadthof: a square with a richly memorable past in the heart of the city. It is waiting for the final paving slabs, greenery and benches. Then it can once again be a pedestrian oasis shielded from traffic noise. But there is no screen to protect it from above. Offenbach has been protesting against this aircraft noise for 43 years. Offenbach's city councillors passed their first protest resolution against the expansion of the airport on February 18, 1971, when the nuisance was still called "Rhine-Main Airport" and the Stadthof was just a construction pit that had taken away parking spaces. Lothar R. Brown