Schlosspark Stammheim

Where the sculpture park greens today, a Rococo manor once stood. It was built around 1780 for Friedrich Ferdinand von Scharffenstein, a baron from 1746 known as "von Pfeil" (1718–1795). The art historian Hermann J. Mahlberg attributes the design to the master builder Johann Georg Leydel. The two-storey manor house was kept in deliberately plain Rococo forms: a main block of nine by four bays beneath a tall, broken mansard roof, flanked on the Rhine side by a smaller wing to the left and right. To the north lay an outer bailey with farm buildings and stables, its central wing housing the library. Under the counts von Fürstenberg the house held numerous works of art. Because the bend of the Rhine was still undeveloped at the time, the view from the estate reached all the way to Cologne Cathedral, some 5.3 kilometres to the south.

With the death of the last resident, Countess Eugenie von Fürstenberg-Stammheim (died 1925), the aristocratic era ended, and in 1928 the City of Cologne bought the manor. During the Nazi period it was used by the Reich Labour Service before an air raid burnt the building down to its outer walls in 1944. As a two-storey war ruin the masonry survived on the right bank of the Rhine into the early 1950s; the farm buildings behind it had already been demolished earlier.

In 1952 the Bayer dye works in Leverkusen took over the site together with a little over 20 Morgen of parkland and, on the footprint of the former farm buildings, erected a retirement home for former staff, named after the then chairman Ulrich Haberland. The manor's actual building site was left empty, and the city retained a right of repurchase. In 1983 Cologne took back the park and buildings free of charge. After an interim use as a student residence run by the Cologne student services, the Ulrich Haberland House has stood empty since 2001; an ideas and investor competition launched in 2018 followed several failed attempts to find an investor or a new use. Of the manor itself only a moulded entrance surround with a double coat of arms in its keystone survives, reused in the construction of the Haberland House.

The park lies opposite the left-bank district of Cologne-Niehl and adjoins the old village core of Stammheim. The main entrance leads from Stammheimer Hauptstraße, beside the historic church of Sankt Mariä Geburt, into the lime-tree avenue. To the north it transitions into the Flittard flood-meadow landscape, and it marks the current endpoint of a planned eleven-kilometre riverside promenade from the Südbrücke to Stammheim — of which only sections have been completed.