After the death of
prince-elector Frederick William of
Brandenburg in 1688, his son, prince-elector Friedrich III, later king Frederick I of Prussia, was allowed to establish a new city on the outskirts of
Cölln, one of the precursor cities of modern-day Berlin. In order to assist with the street layout and the placement of buildings and houses, various architects and engineers, including Johann Nering, Johann Behr, and Martin Grünberg were called in. The new city was founded in 1691. Friedrichstadt was the third expansion of the Berlin-Cölln city center, after Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder. Friedrichstadt was built outside of the Berlin's fortifications, south of Dorotheenstadt and west of Friedrichswerder. However, the city was protected both by the militia of
Leipzig and a lengthening of the western city wall of Dorotheenstadt. Today, this is the site of Mauerstraße (English: Wall Street). Toward the south, Friedrichstadt originally extended to the present-day Zimmerstraße. From that southern point, the city extended approximately to the fortifications of the city of Neu-Cölln. To enter the city from Friedrichswerder, one entered through the Leipziger Tor (English: Leipzig Gate), and to enter from Dorotheenstadt, one came through the Friedrichs-Tor. This new area of the city, however, was not referred to as Friedrichstadt until 1706, fifteen years after its founding. Friedrichstadt was designed with an unusually austere geometric style for the time, with broad streets which intersected at right angles to each other. Because the ground upon which the new neighbourhood was to be built was boggy and unstable, many houses in the city had to be built on stilts and stakes. As a result of government sponsored building rush, 300 houses stood in Friedrichstadt in 1692, just one year after its founding. Many settlers in the city were
Huguenots seeking refuge from the
French government. ''Jerusalem's Chapel'', which used to stand outside of the built-up area before, was included into Friedrichstadt's municipal borders and became its first parish church. In 1689 and 1693–1695
Giovanni Simonetti restored and extended the chapel to become
Jerusalem's Church, which was continuously staffed with a Calvinist and a Lutheran preacher from 1694 on, thus becoming a
simultaneum. In 1701 the Judge Krause at the neighboured
Kammergericht (then Supreme Court of Brandenburg) added a sepulchre chapel for his family to the church building. To accommodate more German and French settlers, ground was broken on the constructions of two large churches, the
French Church of Friedrichstadt, and the German
New Church, in 1701. Construction of new homes continued in the city until 1708. In 1711 at the corner of Jäger and Markgrafen streets a new building for the "Societät der Wissenschaften" (), founded by
Gottfried Leibniz, opened. Today the building is occupied by the
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, which is the third oldest scientific academy in
Europe. Through a royal decree issued by king Frederick I on January 18, 1709 Friedrichstadt, along with the cities of Berlin, Cölln, Friedrichswerder, and Dorotheenstadt were to be consolidated into the "Königliche Haupt- und Residenzstadt Berlin" (), effective January 1, 1710. With that, the independence of Friedrichstadt ended, as it was incorporated as a part of the new Berlin. . After Frederick I's son,
Frederick William I became king, he allowed Berlin, and the Friedrichstadt neighbourhood, to grow considerably. In the 1720s, a new fortified wall was to be constructed. The main construction of the wall took place between 1734 and 1736, however. During this time, a large portion of the military protections between the Friedrichswerder and Friedrichstadt neighbourhoods was removed. The Friedrichstadt neighbourhood was allowed to expand as far as the new fortified security wall. A large proportion of the new residents of the neighbourhood were Huguenots, who continued to be persecuted for their beliefs in France. By 1725, the neighbourhood comprised 700 houses and counted 12,144 residents. In addition, the neighbourhood was home to 85 taverns and 114 distilleries. The actual houses were usually two stories in height, built in the usual
Baroque urban style of the day, but also with a harsh regularity. The houses were built with the long side, never the gable, toward the street. This was because the amount of assistance granted by the government for the construction of houses was based on the length of the front of the house. Because of this, the houses had large gardens in back. With the encouragement of the king, old and unsightly homes were torn down. However, other high authorities wished more homes to be built in the area, to accommodate soldiers and extra French Huguenot refugees, and lots for homes were given away. Along Koch Street, guild halls and tradesmens’ unions were constructed. The construction of a large manor in a neighbourhood could give it a large boost, but the rejection or absence of such plans could result in economic disaster. Friedrichstadt fared favorably, when a French
baron, François Mathieu Vernezobre de Laurieux, built a large palace on
Wilhelm Street because of the marriage of his daughter to a local army captain. In 1735 the
Marcher Consistory, the
Kammergericht and all the other supreme courts of the different territories ruled in
personal union by the
Hohenzollern moved into the new so-called
Collegienhaus, without formally merging the different juridical systems. In 1913 the
Kammergericht (meanwhile having incorporated the other courts) moved into a new edifice and the
Collegienhaus was exclusively used by the Consistory (then competent for Berlin and
Brandenburg, the predecessor of today's
Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia). After its destruction in the
Allied bombing of Berlin in World War II on 3 February 1945 the ruins were reconstructed to house the
Berlin Museum. The
Collegienhaus is one of the few still existing baroque structures in Friedrichstadt and is now part of the
Jewish Museum Berlin. The neighbourhood contained two markets, the Mittelmarkt, now called the
Gendarmenmarkt, and the Dönhoffplatz, which is located near the former fortress. Within the neighbourhood,
Leipziger Straße, site of the Dönhoffplatz, and
Friedrichstraße developed into the neighbourhood’s main streets. Between 1725 and 1737 another 1,000 houses were built in the neighbourhood. However, as the neighbourhood grew, three other open areas remained at the edges of the neighbourhood. As the construction of the neighbourhood continued, the open areas became more and more important. The main director of construction in the neighbourhood,
Philipp Gerlach, developed these open areas into important city plazas, and they were originally named the
Wilhelms-Markt, the
Achteck am Potsdamer Thor, and the
Rondell. The Wilhelms-Markt is so named because it is located on Wilhelmstraße. The plaza is square, and planted with linden trees. Each corner of the square plaza contains a large
marble statue of a famous
Prussian general. The four generals honored in the plaza are
Kurt Christoph Graf von Schwerin,
Hans Karl von Winterfeldt,
Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz, and
Francis Edward James Keith. The Achteck am Potsdamer Thor was renamed the
Leipzigplatz (now Leipziger Platz) in 1814 for the
Battle of Leipzig, and as its German names implies, the plaza has eight corners. The
Rondell is a round plaza, and was subsequently renamed twice. It was renamed the
Belle-Alliance-Platz in 1815 (named after
La Belle Alliance and used as an alternative name for the
Battle of Waterloo), and the
Mehringplatz, after
Franz Mehring, in 1947. The Gendarmenmarkt, Friedrichstadt's main plaza, experienced many changes toward the end of the 18th century. Between 1774 and 1776, a small French theater house was built, which was later christened the Nationaltheater as the establishment came to the forefront in German theater. Also, between 1780 and 1785, the French and German churches on the plaza built distinctive
cupolaed towers on top of their churches, leading to the two being known as the Deutscher Dom and the Französischer Dom (English: German and French
Cathedrals, respectively) to the present day. In 1800, the Nationaltheater was replaced with a larger theater, the Schauspielhaus (English: Play House), whose architecture had to be designed to compete with the new cupola towers on the Gendarmenmarkt's twin churches. However, public reaction to the new theater's design was negative, and many people called the
Carl Gotthard Langhans-designed building the "Koffer" (English: Trunk or suitcase). Luckily for dissatisfied Berliners, the Schauspielhaus burnt to the ground in 1817 and a new theater, designed by
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, was built in its place. In 1843, after 25 years of peace in Prussia, a monument to this achievement, the Friedenssäule (English: Peace Column) was built in the then Belle-Alliance-Platz. The fortified walls which surrounded greater Berlin became a hindrance to
traffic, which was becoming consistently busier and more uncontrolled. Although the walls had been constructed for the purposes of keeping invaders out, and stopping smuggling and deserters, the walls had become an increasing nuisance. Extra gates were deemed necessary. Another gate, the third for the Friedrichstadt neighbourhood, was built in 1839, and opened in 1840. The writer
Max Osborn captures a picture of the economic development of Leipzig Street, and of Friedrichstadt as a whole during the 1870s in one of his memoirs: :
"The center of commercial life in Friedrichstadt was in its shops and offices, but these were somewhat sparse. Linden trees slowly filled the gaps between businesses which had been open for decades, before Leipzig Street had asserted its importance... :
Leipzig Street had a lot of potential, but when it just began, it differed greatly from our current perceptions of a great shopping street. There was no talk of the strings of closed and failed businesses which would occur; there were large gaps in the stores along the streets. However, even then the street was not defeated, its character remained. There were still many respectable middle-class families who lived comfortably in the upper stories of the buildings. In great numbers, they changed the pleasure gardens in the backs of the houses into vegetable gardens, and opened these to the public as inns and other such establishments, where one could sit under tall, old trees. :''The neighbourhood's traffic played out over the pavement in patterns we no longer know. Leipzig Street was not the only place people went in the neighbourhood for shopping of peace of mind ... However, the conquest of Leipzig Street came in phases. While its eastern section was being besieged by the hordes of shoppers, its western sections remained calm."'' Friedrichstraße, named after King Frederick I, the founder of Friedrichstadt, including the section in the Dorotheenstadt neighbourhood, is 3.3 km (2.1 mi) length. It was the first shopping and amusement street in Berlin, and was a major artery in the road network. The street was so large that the royal army used it as a venue to practice marching, due to its length and width. On the western side of the neighbourhood, along the parallel-running
Wilhelmstrasse, which was named after the crown prince, later king
Frederick William, many government offices were constructed, and many government employees lived nearby. In 1896 on the Leipziger Platz, the Wertheim
department store was built. It was at the time the largest department store in Europe. Although the store was destroyed in
World War II, its size has been exceeded only by
Harrods in London. Friedrichstadt was severely damaged in the widespread destruction which accompanied World War II, especially in the first
area bombardment organised and carried out by the
United States Air Force on the morning of February 3, 1945. The bombs consisted mostly of inflammables, hardly explosives. The bombing was so dense that it caused a city fire spreading eastwards, driven by the wind, over the centre and south of Friedrichstadt and the northwest of neighboured Luisenstadt. The fire lasted for four days until it had burnt everything combustible in its range to ashes and after it had reached waterways, and large thoroughfares, parks and the like over which the fire could not jump any further. The death-toll amounted to 2,894 (although this official number is somewhat dubious, for the Nazis always underscored the number of dead to hide their inability to protect the domestic population), whereas the US estimated to have killed some 20,000. The number of wounded amounted to 20,000 and 120,000 lost their homes. Fortunately due to the exhaustion of German supplies the German anti-aircraft defense was underequipped and weak so that out of the 1,600 US aircraft only 36 were shot down and their crews, as far as they survived the crash of their planes, taken into prisonship of war. Many of the historic buildings in the neighbourhood were so badly damaged that they had to be condemned or torn down. The construction of the
Berlin Wall directly through the neighbourhood brought only more destruction. In the northern portion of the neighbourhood, which lay within the boundaries of Mitte Borough, which was part of East Berlin, systematic rebuilding began in 1970. Leipzig Street had been almost completely flattened. == Reconstruction ==