Quarter · Pfaffenthal
Pfaffenthal
The valley quarter under the Red Bridge, once home to one Luxembourger in six — a working town the city forgot, an explosion in 1976 that killed three, and ten years of waiting for the houses that replaced the rubble.
Down here in the narrow part of the valley, under the great red span of the bridge, is the Pfaffenthal — the priests' valley, as the name says. For centuries everyone who came to the fortress from the north passed through it on the way up to the gates, and it grew crowded: in 1806 one Luxembourger in six lived in this one quarter. Then the fortress came down, the new Côte d'Eich road went straight up the hill past it, and the Pfaffenthal was left behind. Before the last war 4,600 people lived here; by the 1970s, 1,500. Those who stayed, and the immigrants who came for the cheap rents — many of them Portuguese — lived in houses a former head of the city's housing department later described as "the worst in the entire city, almost like in the Middle Ages".
On the evening of the 30th of May 1976, a delivery driver at a fuel depot let a large quantity of petrol run into the sewer. The fumes travelled under the streets by the Béinchen bridge and a series of explosions tore through a block of houses. Three people died, one of them a child of four; twenty-five were hurt; around twenty houses were destroyed or wrecked beyond repair, and nearly a hundred people were homeless. The newspapers called it the worst disaster since the end of the war. The mayor promised that rebuilding would be an "absolute priority". It took ten years. On the fifth anniversary two hundred residents in mourning clothes walked to the empty site and laid a symbolic foundation stone in protest; the new houses around their courtyard, "beim Béinchen", were finally finished in 1986. The courts held the driver and the two company directors jointly responsible, and ruled that the families whose houses lacked drain traps bore no blame at all.
The quarter has changed again since. The panoramic lift from the old town lands here, the new railway station and its funicular to the Kirchberg opened in 2017, and the valley is a place people come down to on purpose. Walk it with the old photographs in mind: the towers, the church spire and the river are exactly where they were.
