Guenthersburgpark

About this place

Guenthersburgpark is a green space in the Nordend-Ost district on the north-east side of the city, and it is emphatically a neighbourhood park rather than a sight. Its official area is seven and a half hectares, extended in the nineteen nineties by about four hectares to the north to a design by the landscape architect Dieter Kienast, so it now falls into an old half thick with mature trees and a newer half open to meadow. The ground began as a private estate. The banker Carl Mayer von Rothschild bought it in eighteen thirty-seven, and the city gardener Sebastian Rinz laid it out between thirty-seven and thirty-nine as an English landscape garden of wide lawns and tree groups, with the Villa Guenthersburg built as a summer house in the eighteen forties. When Mayer Carl von Rothschild died in eighteen eighty-six he left the ground to Frankfurt on the condition that the villa be pulled down and the land opened as a public park, which happened on the twenty-sixth of June eighteen ninety-two. What survives from the Rothschild period is the orangery of eighteen fifty-five, badly damaged in the air raids, restored afterwards and used as a church since nineteen fifty. The park itself is now purely everyday: an adventure playground, a water-spray area for children, and lawns that fill with local residents all summer. Nothing here justifies a special trip from the centre, but it is an excellent stop if you are staying nearby or travelling with children.