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 CATHEDRAL OF ESSEN by RitchiS1Leave a Comment
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 CARILLION ESSEN CITY
CENTER by RitchiS1Leave a Comment
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 1. Front entrance to
Zollverein Shaft XII by Nemorino, 3 more photos
The Zollverein was founded in 1847 by an industrialist named Franz Haniel (1799-1868). He gave his mine the name Zollverein in honor of the German Customs Union of 1844, which made it possible to do business in Germany without having to pay tolls every few miles at the borders of the many tiny German states.
By 1920 the Zollverein had four shafts producing 8000 tons of coal per day, but at that point they decided there was no way to modernize those old shafts and increase the daily output, so the solution was to build a new shaft for the sole purpose of bringing up 12000 tons per day in a huge multi-storey elevator.
Surrounding the new shaft they built a processing plant which by the standards of the times (recall that they had nothing resembling the computer technology we have today!) was highly automated. They were so obsessed with automation that the buildings originally didn't have any toilets, but they quickly had to add some when they realized that they still needed hundreds of workers to run the new machines, although not as many as before.
The managers proudly announced that they had eliminated 500 jobs, which then as now was a dubious achievement, since unemployment was one of the many factors that enabled the Nazis to seize power in 1933.
Second photo: Looking up at the elevator tower.
Third photo: Beneath the plants there were railroad tracks so that after the coal had been sorted and processed it could be dumped directly into coal cars and transported to the end users, like the nearby steel mills.
Fourth photo: Under one of the old conveyor belts that moved coal all around the plant they have recently built a pair of escalators to bring people up to the new visitors' center on the second floor. (Third floor to you.) Leave a Comment Address: Gelsenkirchener Straße 181, 45309 EssenPhone: 0201 - 302 01 33Directions: 51°29'11.50" North; 7° 2'38.73" EastWebsite: www.zollverein.de
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 GRILLOTHEATER ESSEN by RitchiS1Leave a Comment Address: THEATERPLATZ 11 , 45127 EssenDirections: CITY CENTER , IN THE PEDESTRIANZONE YOU WALK TO THE DIRECTION OF THE KENNEDY SQUARE , THEN YOU LL FIND THE TEHATER SURELYWebsite: http://www.theater-essen.de
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Until nearly the end of our ninety-minute tour, our guide kept us wondering how he had acquired his detailed knowledge of every square centimeter of the plant.
We knew he couldn't have been a miner, because he was over sixty, and miners didn't live that long. In fact he told us that the miners typically died a horrible death at around age forty-five, essentially suffocating from the layer of rock dust that had collected in their lungs. He said it was the rock dust that did it, not the coal dust. These men usually felt all right during the day, but were in agony when they lay down at night.
There were lots of men like that in his neighborhood, because he grew up right here on the minefield. 800 meters from their house there was a huge ventilating fan that blew the used air up out of the mines, meaning that if the wind was blowing from that direction their house was soon covered with coal dust. His mother didn't have a chance of getting or keeping the laundry clean. As the youngest child he was the last to bathe in the weekly bath water, which was a black brew before he ever got in it.
When he was seventeen he wanted to become a miner, but his father vetoed the idea ("for which I am eternally grateful"), so he joined the Essen fire department instead. For the last seventeen years of his career as a professional fireman he was in charge of fire prevention at the old Zollverein plant and spent most of his working days there.
Second photo: Our tour group looking at the huge sorting machines.
Third and fourth photos: From the roof we could look out at the nearby coke-producing plant, and out over the Ruhr Valley area. Leave a Comment Address: Gelsenkirchener Straße 181, 45309 EssenPhone: 0201 - 302 01 33Directions: 51°29'11.50" North; 7° 2'38.73" EastWebsite: www.zollverein.de
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The Aalto-Theater has announced a very full program for the 2007/2008 season, including six new productions and fourteen revivals. One of the fine singers from the Frankfurt Opera ensemble, Stella Grigorian, is now in Essen to sing the title role of Rossini's Italian Girl in Algiers, which I saw there with a different cast last spring.
In a typical week they might have up to five performances of three different operas, so whenever you go to Essen you have a good chance of seeing an opera or two. And if that isn't enough, the adjoining city of Gelsenkirchen also has a full-scale opera house that is a mere nine kilometers away as the crow flies -- and still only fifteen kilometers if you follow the tram tracks on your bicycle like I did.
Second photo: Musicians tuning up before the performance of Rossini's Italian Girl in Algiers at the Aalto-Theater. Leave a Comment
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 1. Tour group looking at one
of the coal tubs by Nemorino, 4 more photos
Down in the mines there was always a shortage of empty tubs, which was a catastrophe for the miners because they were paid by the tub-load, not the hour. A token identifying the exact point of loading was attached to each tub be means of a thin wire. These tokens were collected up in the plant by the payroll department, so they could figure out exactly how much coal had been produced by each of the 110 loading points down in the mines, and pay the men accordingly at the end of the week.
Second photo: Within the plant the coal tubs were pulled around by cables in the floor.
Third photo: A coal tub on its tracks.
Fourth photo: A tub full of coal.
Fifth photo: A text panel in German and English explaining the route of the coal tubs. Leave a Comment Address: Gelsenkirchener Straße 181, 45309 EssenPhone: 0201 - 302 01 33Directions: 51°29'11.50" North; 7° 2'38.73" EastWebsite: www.zollverein.de
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 1. Conveyor belts for
transporting the coal by Nemorino, 3 more photos
Five huge "washing" machines with swiftly moving water separated the lighter coal from the heavier pieces of rock, but a lot of the sorting work still had to be done by hand. This was usually done by 14 to 17 year old boys, since by law they were too young to be sent down into the mines.
Second photo: These long sorting machines separated the coal from any remaining pieces of rock, and sorted the chunks of coal into different sizes
Third photo: Machinery in the Zollverein.
Fourth photo: One of the workshops in the coal plant. Some of the tools are really large. Leave a Comment Address: Gelsenkirchener Straße 181, 45309 EssenPhone: 0201 - 302 01 33Directions: 51°29'11.50" North; 7° 2'38.73" EastWebsite: www.zollverein.de
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The Grillo Theater in downtown Essen is now the city's main venue for spoken drama, but for many years it served as the opera house while city officials were agonizing over whether to build Aalto's version.
This theater was built from 1890 to 1892 with money bequeathed by a wealthy industrialist named Friedrich Grillo (1825-1888). It was in fact the first City Theater to be built in the Ruhr Valley area. (All the cities in this area are relatively new, since this was all sparsely settled farmland until the first railroads were built and coal mining started here in earnest around the middle of the nineteenth century.)
The Grillo Theater was destroyed by bombings in 1944 and was rebuilt in a simplified form after the war. In 1950 it was reopened under the name "Opera House", which is what it remained until the opening of the Aalto-Theater in 1988.
Second photo: This sign on the Grillo-Theater is entitled "Opera House". Leave a Comment Address: Theaterplatz 11, EssenPhone: 0201/8122200Directions: 51°27'17.37" North; 7° 0'40.20" EastWebsite: www.schauspiel-essen.de
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In 1958 the city of Essen conducted an architects' competition to design a modern new opera house. The winner was the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976).
Of course just winning a competition is no guarantee that your design will actually be built. The German cities of Leipzig and Kassel both held architects' competitions for new opera houses in the 1950s, and neither of them actually managed to build the winning design.
For a long time it looked as though Aalto's design for Essen was going to have the same fate, but then in the 1980s they started getting their act together and began building Aalto's opera house under the artistic direction of his widow Elissa Aalto. In 1988, a mere thirty years after the original competition, the building was inaugurated with a performance of Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
Additional photos: People in the lobby of the Aalto-Theater. Leave a Comment
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- Hotel Palla Garni
Eppinghoferstr. 31 North Rhine Westfalia, Essen - Hotel Residence
Auf Der Forst 1, Essen - Gimken Landhaushotel
Schlossstrasse 182, Essen - Rheinischer Hof
Hedwigstrasse 11, Essen - Ibis Essen
Hollestrasse 50, Essen - Movenpick Hotel Essen
Am Hauptbahnhof 2, Essen - Margrefshof
Margrefstrasse 40, Essen - Welcome Hotel Rheinresidenz Wesel
Rheinpromenade 10, Essen - Holiday Inn Express Essen
Thea Leymann Strasse 11-13, Essen - Best Western Hotel Im Forum Muelheim
Hans Bockler Platz 19 (formerly Clipper Hotel Mulheim), Essen - Hotel Petul
Essener Strasse 11-13, Essen - Welcome Hotel Ruhr Residenz Essen
Schutzenbahn 58, Essen - Hotel Hoffmann
Hedwigstrasse 6, Essen - Hotel Jung
Wehmenkamp 1, Essen - Hotel Im Giradet Haus
Girardetstrasse 2 38, Essen
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