Bottrop
The Quadrat museum lies on the edge of the Stadtgarten. This is maybe the best new museum in the Ruhr District and was erected in two phases between 1976 and 1983. The architecture of the building is considerably influenced by the artistic creations of Josef Albers, a "famous son" of the town. Albers was born in Bottrop in 1888 and worked here between 1908-19 as a Volkschule teacher. After studying arts in Berlin he worked at the Bauhaus in Weimar before he had to emigrate to the USA in 1933. His avant-garde life's work stands definitively under the motto "Homage to the Square".
The core of the Bottrop Arts Collection consists of 125 paintings as well as almost all of the graphic work of Josef Albers. Otherwise, the museum complex which consists of four large pavilions each of square plan, today houses a Medienzentrum, a modern gallery as well as the Museum for Early and Local History.
In the Ice Age gallery the permanent geological exhibition is based on an important collection of several thousand fossils, many of these treasures being recovered while dredging the Rhein-Herne Canal and during coal extraction underground (although number of the fossils on show is much smaller and are often not local)
In the east of Bottrop, an expansive slag heap is crowned with the Tetraeder by the Darmstadt architect Wolfgang Christ - a 54m high, three-sided pyramid from steel tubing, which appears to be like a free floating light sculpture when illuminated at night.
Herne
In 1975, Herne merged with Wanne-Eickel, the latter being itself formed by a merger in 1926.
Nevertheless, the main railway station is called Wanne-Eickel. Its broad tracks separate Wanne in the north from Eickel to the south (apart from a small section of Wanne which lies south of the railway).
Coal-mining in Herne began in 1857 with the digging of the first shaft of the Shamrock mine under the direction of the Irish engineer Thomas Mulvany. Among the first Shamrock workers there were several Irish and British workers. In Behrenspark on the Bahnhofstraße stands today still the gravestone which a co-worker of Mulvany placed for his wife, who died in Herne in 1865. The inscription, in remembrance of Isabella Griffith, is in English. The mine shut in 1961 and on its grounds stands now the Chemische Werke Hüls AG.
The administration building of the Shamrock mine remains, in historising Tudor style -likewise with clock-tower (which can be viewed from the works entrance on the Shamrock-Straße).
Castrop-Rauxel
In 1867, Thomas Mulvaney opened a mine here, called Erin. This was finally the last mine in Castrop-Rauxel to close, in 1983 (although the original mine was taken over fully exploited by Friedrich Grillo. One winding tower has been left as a monument.
Mulvaney bought a residence here - Haus Goldschmieding, and laid out a horse-racing track in the grounds -
the Naturhindernisbahn, which was closed in 1970. The
Reiterbrunnen, on the market square celebrates this aspect of the town's history.
. The Haus itself was built around 1600 on the site of a former Wasserburg and is now an upmarket restaurant.