On Roßstraße, the Herz-Jesu church stands out among the houses. Its Gothic Revival building dates from 1905 to 1907, when Derendorf was already part of the expanding city. The church is one of the landmarks of a neighbourhood whose streets have survived many changes. While former industrial sites have acquired other purposes, an older streetscape remains visible here. Today's Derendorf unfolds between these established places and newer uses.
The route to this point began in very different surroundings. Around 1800, farming still occupied large parts of the area; farms shaped the landscape before industry and the railway claimed new spaces during the nineteenth century. Düsseldorf expanded beyond its former fortifications. Alongside workshops, factories and transport infrastructure came homes and buildings for communal and religious life. A district emerged in which housing, work and the provision of supplies found room close together.
The Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences campus on Münsterstraße shows how this neighbourhood continues to change. The municipal abattoir operated here until 2002. Its cattle market hall and horse abattoir, both protected as historic buildings since 1999, survived as new university buildings were added. Today, the cattle market hall houses the library and Campus IT. Between the old halls and new buildings, a place that once supplied the city has become a place of study, with earlier structures put to new use.
The grounds also have a painful history. Between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis used the abattoir as an assembly point for the deportation of Jewish people from the Düsseldorf administrative district. From the nearby freight station, they were deported to ghettos in occupied Eastern Europe. Opened in 2016, the Alter Schlachthof memorial site documents these crimes and the lives of those persecuted, with a digital archive bringing together biographical research, documents and photographs.
The campus is an important part of Derendorf, while its established streets provide the wider setting. On Roßstraße, the church stands among the houses; on Münsterstraße, surviving industrial buildings meet new university architecture. Between them, the district can also be read without dates: through buildings that have kept their original purpose and others whose old walls now contain a different daily life.
Sources and data
Information checked and sources accessed: 2026-10-17. Main sources: City of Düsseldorf: Derendorf, Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences: opening of the memorial site, university: Alter Schlachthof memorial site and Herz-Jesu church: building history.