The idea of expanding the city of Mainz into the socalled "Gartenfeld" (literally garden field), which was interspersed with improvised buildings, had been around for a long time.

There, in the rayon zone, no stone buildings were allowed to stand that could offer protection to advancing troops.

A statistic from 1869 by Alfred Börckel, court counsellor and librarian of the Mainz municipal library, illustrates the predicament: the number of people occupying the space of one Prussian acre was 8 in Barmen, 11 in Potsdam, 24 in Darmstadt, 28 in Berlin, 65 in Hamburg and 71 in Cologne - but in Mainz the figure was 89.

In Mainz, the flats were hopelessly overcrowded, sanitary facilities were lacking and a cholera epidemic threatened to break out at any time.

The military agreed to the demolition of the old walls only after long, tough negotiations between the city of Mainz and the Prussian War Ministry, after the fortress of Metz in Lorraine formed the new bulwark to France.

In mid-March 1873, the city began to demolish the ramparts in the area of today's Kaiserstraße and to build on the garden field.

His basic idea was the development of the garden field through a symmetrical, grid-like street system of longitudinal and transverse axes, broken up by green avenues and squares.

Shortly before taking up his post, Kreyßig had visited the Exposition Universelle (1867) in Paris and admired Haussmann's revolutionary ideas.

The buildings from this era are still recognisable today, although they were badly affected by the Bombing of Mainz in World War II.

Even today, the main problems with the development of the garden field is obvious, the terrain was very low and therefore frequently flooded.

The city builder's plans called for the entire area to be filled in, which was also necessary for the construction of the sewage system.

Kreyßig moved it to the west side of the city from 1880 with the consequence of tunneling under the citadel and building a new central station.