EThe Frankfurt wholesale market hall would last in a hundred years, predicted its architect, the then municipal building director Martin Elsaesser. His prophecy is likely to come true, in five years, i.e. in 2028, Frankfurt will celebrate the 100th birthday of this icon of the “New Frankfurt” construction program. Of course, the wholesale market hall in the east of the city, which has been a listed building since 1984, has long since lost its old function as a distribution center for vegetables and fruit. Instead of oranges and heads of lettuce, foreign exchange has been traded on its premises since the European Central Bank bought the hall in 2002 and made it part of its new building on Sonnemannstraße between 2010 and 2014.
This year, the Grossmarkthalle is celebrating a different anniversary, namely the 70th anniversary of its reopening after the Second World War on February 12, 1953. This was preceded by four years of reconstruction of the western part of the building, which had been hit by bombs and destroyed. It is purely coincidental that the Allied planes did not erase the hall and the surrounding buildings. Like the inner city, which ended up lying in ruins, the Osthafen was the target of the major bombing raids on October 4, 1943, January 29, March 18 and March 22, 1944.
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