The Königsgrube colliery in the northern corner between Günnigfelder and Röhlinghauser Straße had been created since 1856 by Magdeburger Bergwerks AG, which was founded the year before. The shafts 1 and 2 promoted since 1863, 1888 began the devil works at the weather shaft 3, 1904 came the double feed shaft 4 in operation. Acquired in 1954 by Hanover-Hanibal AG, the mine was decommissioned together with their facilities in 1973 and their day facilities completely demolished. The settlement, which was located immediately to the west of the mine site, was preserved.
The settlement Königsgrube was built in several construction phases between 1875 and 1914 as a colliery and was extended to 1929 by the miners' settlement Stadt and district Gelsenkirchen. The first houses were built on the Hannoverstraße, Am Bollwerk and on the southern Gustav and Eisenstraße. In the 1880s, other buildings were listed east of the Hannover Road, in the Lakenbruch. Between 1901 and 1904, the rows of houses were built on the Rhenish and Hofstraße, between which a generous park with gymnasium and playground was created in 1905 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Magdeburger Bergwerks AG. This year, the coal mine, with its workforce of 1600 workers and 38 civil servants, already had a total of 117 workers' houses, almost all for four families. Each apartment had a separate entrance, two lower and two upper rooms, a cellar, a stable and garden land. For the officials of the colliery were 18, mainly two-family houses available. Between 1905 - 1908 the northern part of the Gustavstrasse and the street Hasenhorst were built, until 1914 the Günnigfelder Straße.
Although not overly confortable, life in the green, airy and light-emitting coalmines was much more pleasant than in the cramped tenements of the second half of the century. In addition, rents for company apartments in the Königsgrube collieries were around 50 percent lower than those on the free housing market. But not every miner could get such a flat. In 1900, of the total of 16,500 miners in the Gelsenkirchen district, which included the Königsgrube, only 23 percent lived with their families in their own flats. Source: route-industriekultur.de