A palace at the end of an avenue, an artists' garden and a courtyard framed in brick: Pempelfort's cultural history has several very different outdoor settings. They lie north of central Düsseldorf, rather than within a single museum campus. A densely built district stretches between them, its streets carrying the routes from one place to the next. Art does not begin behind one shared entrance here, which makes its surroundings worth considering too.
At Schloss Jägerhof, that relationship is particularly clear. The eighteenth-century palace forms the focal point of an avenue in the Hofgarten and now houses the Goethe Museum. It represents both a courtly past and a later use of that inheritance: a building designed for display has become a place for literature and cultural history. Large parts of the Hofgarten lie within Pempelfort, though not the entire park. Its paths continue across the district boundary, connecting the palace with the city centre.
While the palace looks back to the age of the Electors, the nearby Malkasten tells a story about nineteenth-century artists. Founded in 1848, the association is closely connected with the former Jacobi estate and its garden. Exhibitions, discussions and events remain part of its programme. This is a different form of cultural life from a museum collection, one also created through people meeting, showing their work and talking about art. The garden is more than a green border around the venue; it belongs to the history of the meeting place itself.
Moving from garden to courtyard brings a different setting for public culture. At the Ehrenhof, closer to the Rhine, brick façades and a long central axis organise the space. Wilhelm Kreis designed the ensemble for the GeSoLei exhibition of 1926. Today's Tonhalle was built as a multipurpose hall and also served as a planetarium; the Kunstpalast and NRW-Forum belong to the complex. At Jägerhof, an avenue leads the eye towards one palace. Here, several buildings frame a shared outdoor space. Their arrangement reveals the scale of Düsseldorf's cultural ambitions at the time, even without an exhibition ticket.
Yet Pempelfort does not stop at these grand settings. Nordstraße, sometimes mistakenly assigned to Derendorf, is also part of the district and forms an important shopping area. Around streets like this, the cultural landmarks take their place in a network of houses, shops and junctions. That changes the view of palace and courtyard too: neither stands apart from the inhabited city. Between a garden path and a shopping street, Pempelfort needs no grand entrance. The connections are already there.
Sources and data
Information checked and sources accessed: 2026-10-17. Main sources: City of Düsseldorf: Pempelfort, baukunst-nrw: the Ehrenhof and GeSoLei, Goethe Museum Düsseldorf and Malkasten artists' association.