1956:Laying of the foundation stone for Neu-Altona

On April 4, 1956, the largest construction project in the young Federal Republic begins. Hamburg's Mayor Kurt Sieveking lays the foundation stone for a new block of flats on Paul-Roosen-Strasse in Altona. Because there is still a severe housing shortage eleven years after the end of the war, the city planners do not want to build individual houses or streets, but rather a total of 11,000 apartments for 40,000 people on an area of ​​210 hectares, the size of 300 soccer fields. It is located between Nobistor and Altona train station, Holstenstraße and Palmaille and is called "Neu-Altona".

Ernst May:Famous urban planner with radical ideas

The new district was designed by the architect Ernst May, the most important German urban planner of the 20th century, a radical technocrat to whom everything seems feasible:As early as 1930 he caused an international sensation with Cubist satellite settlements in Frankfurt, when he was chief engineer for housing construction in the Soviet Union advised to demolish Moscow and built industrial cities like Magnitogorsk from scratch. In 1954, Werner Hebebrand, the senior building director in Hamburg and a member of his staff in the Soviet Union, brought him to Hamburg from the East African emigration. May becomes head of planning for the world's largest housing group, "Neue Heimat".

After the war, the quarter is a desert of rubble

In a Mercedes 180 D, 67-year-old May is driven through Altona, a field of rubble from which only a few bunkers, church ruins and tenements protrude. In the 1920s, Altona's Lord Mayor Max Brauer described the desolate area around the Trinitatiskirche with its gray courtyards as a "seed of epidemics and crimes". The cosmopolitan May now calls the old houses inhumane "slums" and wants to demolish them, along with the preserved buildings from the Wilhelminian period.

The visions of the technocrats

Plans for the redevelopment of Altona already existed in the German Empire. During the Weimar Republic, however, there was no money. Entire streets were demolished under the National Socialists, also because the regime suspected the workers living there to be communists.

The architect Konstanty Gutschow, who was commissioned by Hitler to plan the Führerstadt Hamburg in 1939, called for high-rise buildings on the Palmaille, relaxed row construction, green corridors and wide thoroughfares. He sees the devastating bombing raids of Operation Gomorrah in 1943 as an opportunity to realize his visions. Incidentally, this is what urban planners all over Europe think in those years. Gutschow's general development plan also served as the basis for Ernst May's drafts ten years later. And Gutschow's former employees are in the "Planning Office Neu-Altona".

May criticizes the attempts to build up in other major German cities as "muddling around" and "filling gaps in the teeth". He assumes an empty space between the Reeperbahn and Max-Brauer-Allee, plans without considering historical structures, wants to build the ideal city of the future in Altona.

Destruction and construction lie side by side

In his pastel-toned office near the "Neue Heimat", which is equipped with tubular steel furniture, city maps, measuring tables and aerial photos are soon piling up. May has 2,000 photos taken of ruins and remains of houses in Altona. Together with chief building director Hebebrand, May is now laying out new property boundaries on the drawing board, has a new road system with wide traffic routes for the increasing car traffic, plans high-rise buildings, subway lines, schools, commercial areas, green spaces, district heating for the entire area. The estimated costs will soon reach 300 million marks.

The planners want to erase the memory of the old Altona, do not rebuild the historic town hall on Königstraße, demote the former center around the Trinity Church to a dog park, destroy historic buildings on the Palmaille, willingly supported by the monument protection office.

Not only is the urban planning concept modern, the design language should be too. In contrast to traditional construction with dark red bricks, the design ordinance now expressly prescribes light-colored bricks. And flat roofs are required for houses higher than four stories. May scoffs, the residents only collect "old stovepipes, disused armchairs and other junk" under the pitched roofs.

Vision and reality

But the work is progressing slowly. The demolition of undamaged houses, for which Hebebrand had to obtain a special permit in view of the great housing shortage, is stagnating because there is no alternative accommodation for the residents. After seven years only 3,500 apartments are finished. The central shopping street, Neue Große Bergstrasse, with distinctive, transverse office buildings in the western part, will only open after ten years of construction, as Hamburg's first pedestrian zone. Ernst May had long since left "Neue Heimat" to design satellite towns and prefabricated housing estates elsewhere, such as Neue Vahr in Bremen.

After the planned construction period of 19 years has elapsed, only half of the originally planned buildings are standing. The hopes of a new beginning have long since given way to disillusionment. In the 1970s, the Frappant shopping center was soon criticized for being a "concrete block" and an "eyesore". Arterial roads and commercial yards divide the residential areas, green areas are neglected. Critics now regard Neu-Altona as "one of the deadliest areas in the city".

Altona plans further

Even if there is no lack of attempts to save the urban development experiment of the post-war period through continued demolition and new construction, most recently through the establishment of the Ikea branch in Grosse Bergstraße, May's "humane city in the countryside" has remained a utopia. Instead, Altona has long been building the "New Center".