Europaviertel

Eastern Europaallee, the main street in the new quarter

The Europaviertel (European quarter) is a housing and business quarter development in the Gallus district of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It is built on the former ground of the main goods station Hauptgüterbahnhof. Development work began in 2005, and the first building was opened in 2006. Upon its completion, the area will have offices, hotels, apartments, a school and social infrastructure, parks, and shopping and leisure facilities. The completion of a connection to Frankfurt's U-Bahn is planned for after 2025. Europaviertel will approximately have a population of 30,000 workers and 8,000 to 10,000 residents; This ratio could still shift in favor of the number of residents due to the increased demand for apartments since around 2012. The Skyline Plaza complex, including a shopping mall and congress center, is within the district.

Size and Location

The cleared area is almost 90 hectares (220 acres) in size. The area is divided - based on the two property owners - into Europaviertel West and Europaviertel Ost. The clearly visible border is the elevated track of the Main–Weser Railway on the bridge Emser Brücke, between the stations Galluswarte and Messe. In the western part, Aurelis Asset GmbH owns 66.7 hectares (165 acres) and in the eastern part, 18 hectares (44 acres) belong to Vivico Real Estate GmbH (since June 2011: CA Immo). Today the district covers a total of 145 hectares (360 acres), including other peripheral areas. The area extends approximately 2.4 kilometres (1.5 mi) from the residential area on the Rebstock area and the Kuhwaldsiedlung in the northwest along the exhibition grounds to Güterplatz in the southeast. South of the Europaviertel the Hellerhofsiedlung housing area in the "old" Gallus is located.

History

The Europaviertel is built on the former ground of the main goods station Hauptgüterbahnhof. The picture was taken where today the Gleisfeldpark (e. g. Railway track-field Park) is located.

Ideas for relocating the freight railway facilities that were previously on the site already existed between the two World Wars. They came to an end with the Second World War and were not taken up again afterwards. Instead, the destroyed facilities were rebuilt and modernized in the 1960s. It was only with the expansion of the city of Frankfurt to the west, which found its highly visible expression in the skyscraper silhouette, particularly the trade fair tower, that the pressure to use the space to a higher quality increased. In addition, there was the need to expand the Frankfurt trade fair, the move of the Federal Railway headquarters in 1993 to a new building on the site of the repair shop on Idsteiner Straße, which had already been closed in 1989, and the structural change in rail freight transport towards transport with containers. Both the trade fair and the Deutsche Bundesbahn commissioned studies into a conversion, initially limited to the areas east of the Emser Bridge. In 1996, as part of its Frankfurt 21 project, Deutsche Bahn decided to close the main freight yard and the marshalling yard west of the Emser Bridge and to relocate the remaining freight activities. The container traffic was concentrated in the expanded terminal at the Ostbahnhof, the general cargo traffic ended up on the road and the shunting business was taken up in other marshalling yards, e.g. B. in Mainz-Bischofsheim. Operations at the main freight station were discontinued in 1998. In 1999, the Frankfurt planning office Albert Speer & Partner (AS&P) created a framework plan for the future development of the area on behalf of Deutsche Bahn. The usage concept envisaged shares of 25 percent each for residential areas, green areas, trade fair expansion and mixed areas for the derelict railway areas. A competing plan, which the architect Helmut Jahn designed on behalf of Deutsche Bank under the title Messestadt, was not pursued further because Deutsche Bahn did not want to sell the core site. First, the neighboring Messe Frankfurt acquired 31,000 m² of space in order to be able to expand its premises to the south. On the expansion area, among other things, were created: from 2000 to 2001 the exhibition hall 3 and the new east gate. Subsequently, in 2003, shunting operations were also stopped, clearing the way for construction work in the western European Quarter.

Europaviertel East

• August 2004: Start of construction of Europa-Allee
• May 2006: Completion of the Mövenpick Hotel
• November 2007: Groundbreaking ceremony for the first apartments on Europa-Allee
• January 2008: Contract between Vivico and Hyatt for a Grand Hyatt. In spring 2013 it was announced that the Hyatt Group had abandoned the project. At this point south of Kap Europa there is now a hotel on a property that has been divided again; The southern high-rise called the Grand Tower (formerly “Tower 2”) has been under construction since the beginning of 2016 and, at 172 meters, is Germany's tallest purely-residential property.
• September 2008: Groundbreaking for Tower 185
• October 2008: Groundbreaking ceremony for the Europa-Allee 12–22 office building
• November 2008: Start of construction of the Meininger Hotel
• July 2009: The first apartments are occupied in the Europaviertel
• February 2010: Meininger Hotel is completed
• September 2022: The One high-rise building, which is located on the construction site north of Kap Europa and reaches a height of 175 meters, was opened.
• Building law also exists for a (currently dormant) project, the up-to-369-meter high Millennium Tower.

External links

• Media related to Europaviertel (Frankfurt) at Wikimedia Commons