EL-DE Haus

The EL-DE House (pronounced: L-D-House) owes its name to the initials of the building owner Leopold Dahmen. The Catholic wholesaler of gold articles and clocks lived with his family on Appellhofplatz 21, from where he also ran his business. In order to build the house next door, he had two residential buildings torn down on the corner lot on Elisenstraße. Then, during 1934/35, a larger house with both residential and commercial space was built. According to the design by the architect Hans Erberich, this constituted a four storey building with originally six axes along its main shop front on Appellhofplatz (still part of Langgasse during the time of construction) and a twelve-axis front along the relatively narrow Elisenstrasse. The building was designed in a strictly neoclassical style and had a tufa facade as well as a rounded corner. The building style was commended as ‘modern’ by the NS-paper ‘Westdeutscher Beobachter’. The original door remains in place to this day, the owner’s initials were engraved upon it, thus giving the house its name. The well-preserved wall relief on the corner of the house is also a reference to its owner. It shows two crests, the city arms on the left and an emblem with the letters EL DE engraved on the right with two pendula of a longcase clock underneath and the letters L and D for Leopold Dahmen hewn into the two circular bottom parts, respectively.