A few former streets and squares that once stood in the area were rebuilt, most notably the historical coronation route of German emperors through the old town from the cathedral.

In the past years, two other important facilities abandoned the Altstadt and the city as a whole: the German Federal Court of Auditors of Berliner Straße which was relocated to Bonn, and the headquarters of Degussa from Weißfrauenstraße which moved to Düsseldorf.

In the meantime the Altstadtstrecke gained a firm place in local public passenger transport, especially with the Ebbelwei-express, which serves an exclusive tourist route.

Archaeological digs on the Römerberg, and most recently near the Alte Nikolaikirche, revealed slight remains of a wall to be considered Carolingian, which would presumably have surrounded the settlement on the Samstagsberg and, in a continued process, would also satisfactorily explain the striking rounding of the plots on the former Goldhutgasse.

Recent publications cautiously point out that at the earliest from the middle of the 10th century there was a very long transition from the post house to the half-timbered building with stone foundations.

A little later, the urban area was enclosed by a wall named after the Swabian noble family, the course of which is still clearly visible in the shape of the city due to minor remains above ground.

Most of the church and monastery foundations and the construction of the most important public buildings, most recently the town hall which was rebuilt in 1405, fell into this first political and economic heyday through the acquisition of numerous imperial privileges.

Archaeological excavations in the 1950s and 1990s brought to light the remains of a Roman military camp, an Alamanni property yard and a Merovingian king's court.

In the middle of the district Neue Kräme connected the two largest squares of the Altstadt, Liebfrauenberg to Römerberg and further towards the south lying Fahrtor on the bank of the Main and the harbour there.

Each area placed a militarily organised citizen's resistance under the command of a civilian captain, which the only democratically elected department in the otherwise corporate composed imperial city.

In 1809 he wrote a set of articles for the city of Frankfurt on behalf of the Grand Duke Carl Theodor von Dalberg, which basically remained in force until 1880.

The classicist zeitgeist is clear from the description:The overload with carving and lappy artistry and the shapeless three- and four-story roofs make them easily recognizable by the eye.

Large parts of the old town were now considered to be the residential area of the proletariat and poorer petty bourgeoisie, where poverty, prostitution and crime were rampant.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the structure of the old town had remained largely unchanged since the Middle Ages, as a comparison with Merian copper engravings shows.

A citizens' initiative, the association of active friends of the old town founded in 1922 under the direction of art historian Fried Lübbecke, opposed these efforts.

[4] In Nazi Germany, this neologism was an umbrella term for measures taken by the city administration to preserve the old town as an overall monument; they took place simultaneously in Hamburg, Cologne, Braunschweig, Kassel and Hanover, among others.

'Clearing out' was a euphemism for in part extensive gutting measures, in modern usage the "renovation by demolition" that was common until the 1970s, which was carried out in some of the courtyards that were completely built up over the centuries.

The Federation of Friends of the Old Town, therefore, often with the help of external institutions such as the students from the Frankfurt School of Engineering or retired architects, had the entire existing building stock photographed and drawn as of summer 1942.

The first serious air raid on Frankfurt am Main hit the old town on 4 October 1943, including the Römer and the area between Liebfrauenberg, Töngesgasse and Hasengasse.

The worst blow was yet to come: on 22 March 1944, another British air raid of 816 aircraft destroyed large parts of the old town that had previously been spared, including all churches except the Old Nikolaikirche and Leonhardskirche.

As with previous air raids, this was part of the tactic: the majority of all houses in the old town were built in half-timbered construction, so that they largely burned completely in the unleashed firestorm.

The main reason for the fact that the number of victims was not higher than in other cities was that, since the summer of 1940, the solidly built cellars of the old town houses had been interconnected.

Finally, albeit with a clear tendency towards modernisation, a mixed solution was found: some prominent monuments were reconstructed, the first being the Paulskirche in 1947 and the Goethe House in 1949.

The other reconstructions, which are particularly fortunate to represent all forms of the local half-timbered building from Gothic to Classicism, can be seen as prototypical for the urban effect of the development of the entire district that was preserved until 1944.

Since the beams and their infill were traditionally plastered or slated, decorative forms were installed in the now visible half-timbering, which were borrowed from other buildings of comparable construction.

The Haus am Dom, an educational center of the Catholic diocese of Limburg, was built in 2007 on Domstrasse on the preserved substructure of the former main customs office from 1927.

North of the Römerberg on Paulsplatz is the New Town Hall, built around 1900 with rich neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque decor, as well as the Paulskirche, where the German National Assembly met in 1848/1849.

Striking new buildings are the Großer Rebstock houses on the market next to the Haus am Dom, Neues Paradies on the corner of the Hühnermarkt, Altes Kaufhaus, the city of Milan and Zu den Drei Römer on the western edge of the new development area.

Quiet, green courtyards were created, whose irregular design and small passageways could remind people with a lot of imagination of the enchanted old town streets.

The Judengasse ended here, since 1882 the Börneplatz synagogue, destroyed in the November pogroms in 1938, was here, and the Old Jewish Cemetery, Battonnstrasse, whose oldest grave monuments date from 1272, is still located here today.