It’s the 13th year after one of the biggest bankruptcies in post-war history, which doesn’t sound promising. The insolvency of “Quelle” – for the younger ones: that was roughly the Amazon of the economic miracle – hit the city of Nuremberg, which is used to beatings, in 2009 like little before. What has happened since then? Great ideas, such as a university building in a listed building, died out. And one company failed miserably – the second largest empty industrial monument in the republic after Berlin-Tempelhof had simply proved to be too big for this investor. But now (with another investor) land is gradually in sight.
Marc Thiel is a board member of the Düsseldorf Gerchgroup AG, he chooses a drastic picture. When the colossus, with its 250,000 square meters of floor space, was taken over in 2018, the building seemed like a “leech between Fürth and Nuremberg”, after almost ten years of standstill at the time. A building as a stigma – and hermetic castle, behind the scenes of which one could hardly see. The Düsseldorf-based company wants to do the latter in a decidedly different way, as a “hands-on builder” they see themselves. The fact that the southern lane of Fürther Strasse, the historic industrial thoroughfare par excellence, will soon have to be closed to traffic because of the planned underground car park, is taken as an occasion for a tour of the construction site. In 2024, that is the message, offices of the city of Nuremberg are to move here.
Nuremberg’s economics officer, Michael Fraas, speaks of what will then be the city’s largest office rental, even if the youth and social welfare office, immigration authorities and municipal IT departments will only take up a fraction of the entire building for themselves. The rest of the building – it is now called “The Q” – is to be filled with a mix of retail, gastronomy and apartments. And for that, reports Klaus Everest, what is needed above all is: light, light and more light. The trickiest task on this gigantic construction site is to add the corresponding atriums to the monument. If he didn’t have it on his cheek, says Everest, he would have “probably a few problems” fewer. But then he wouldn’t have his wife either. He got to know them “on source” soon after the bankruptcy. He initially worked there as a caretaker, but Everest is now the site manager. There are also beautiful stories on Fürther Straße.