Tour around the Fischmarkt - Part 2

image author: Uwe Albrecht

Opposite, one can see the little tree house, built 1774/75, the former office building of the tollgate keeper, who closed the harbour entrance with a log. The harbour master carried out his supervision of the Hanseatic harbour from here. Today the half-timbered house accommodates a small private Stade museum.

image author: Uwe Albrecht

Already at the end of the 10th-century, the first jetty was built here at the foot of the just heaped-up Spiegelberg, protected by a small castle. With the transition of city rule to the Bremen archbishops in 1235 the whole area was heaped up and a port basin was designed, bordered by wooden fixture, which were replaced by brick walls only from 1870 onwards. Apart from that the Hanseatic harbour of the 13th-century, even though it became fast too small, has been preserved in its original form. It is one of few harbour facilities, which are still visible in this form.

The port basin is framed by two closed streets, which characterise Stade's cityscape Wasser West and Wasser Ost. Water, that is for Stade the Schwinge, which flows below the city into the Elbe, 'but water is also the description of the harbour, whom the urban settlement owes its importance. The houses along the water belong to the east side to ferry mariners and captains, on the west side more to merchants and grain traders. And so the houses seem a lot are more splendid than on the other side as for example the Mayor-Hintze-House.