[2] In the late 1980s, local people were alarmed by the plans of Friedrich Kurz to gentrify the theatre by making it a venue for performances of The Phantom of the Opera, fearing it would attract tourists and change the area; they proposed to turn it into a community centre instead.

[1] At the beginning the occupiers were very much focused on local struggles and as time went by, the Rote Flora has developed into a self-managed social centre connected to left-wing, anarchist activism, with links to similar projects in Amsterdam, Berlin and Copenhagen.

[5] The building provides a music venue, an infoshop, a social movement archive, a bar, a cafe, rehearsal rooms and a bicycle repair workshop.

[4] When a well-known neo-Nazi was given a social housing apartment in a block behind the project in the 1990s, Rote Flora organised demonstrations against his tenancy.

[4][8] Ultimately, in mid-January 2014, the borough of Altona announced a change in plans for the site that would ensure the building would not be demolished and could remain a cultural centre.

[10][11] The Rote Flora distanced itself from the rioters, with a spokesperson saying that "that a form of militancy was brought onto the streets which was intoxicated with itself, and we find that both politically and in terms of content wrong" ("dass hier eine Form von Militanz auf die Straße getragen wurde, die sich selbst berauscht hat und das finden wir politisch und inhaltlich falsch").

"[11] The Rote Flora collective gave the building the address of Achidi-John Platz 1 to commemorate a man, Achidi John, who died in 2001 after being forced by police officers to swallow an emetic.