Gebhardgebäude

The Gebhardgebäude once stood in Vohwinkel, a district of Wuppertal, on Kaiserstraße. It was built in 1875 as the administrative headquarters of Gebhard & Co. AG, a silk-weaving firm founded in 1797 by three merchants in Hardenberg. The company moved to Elberfeld in 1807, was refounded in 1859 by Franz Josef Gebhard, and relocated to Vohwinkel in 1886. By 1907 it had become a public company with branches in Monschau and over two thousand employees. The firm collapsed in 1974 after decades of expansion. Archaeologists uncovered Roman remains during its construction. In 1927 workers found a wooden water pipe at a depth of three to four metres, made from a split oak trunk with a central channel twenty centimetres wide. Inside the pipe lay a well-preserved coin from 194 AD bearing the portrait of Emperor Septimius Severus. The reverse showed three maidens with cornucopias and scales, an emblem of imperial coinage. Experts from Bonn’s provincial museum examined the find, suggesting the valley had been settled eighteen centuries earlier. After the silk company’s bankruptcy the building housed an ice rink opened in 1980, one of Europe’s largest covered rinks at the time. Later it contained a dance school, post office, shops, doctors’ surgeries and lawyers’ offices. Fires in 2006 damaged parts of the structure, leading to its eventual demolition in 2015. Today the site awaits new retail development, while the Roman coin remains in municipal custody.