The area northwest of the city center with almost 50 hectares of meadow land was ideal for an extensive port facility. Recurring floods also required protective measures for urban development. The mouth of the Weißeritz was relocated to the west to Cotta and at the same time as the port was being expanded, a flood channel over 300 meters wide was created across the site. Between 1891 and 1895, over 1.5 million cubic meters of earth were excavated for the over one kilometer long harbor basin and the flood channel. The excavation was used for the drainage mountain of the Friedrichstadt marshalling yard as well as a flood-proof embankment, the later slaughterhouse island. With what is now a smaller harbor basin, Alberthafen has become an expert in the shipping of rotor blades, large aggregates and heavy goods as well as handling general cargo and bulk cargo.
The Bienert harbor mill is unmistakably all in white. Based on designs by Lossow and Kühne, the architects and others. of the Dresden theater and the main train station in Leipzig, this 64-meter-high colossus made of reinforced concrete was built in 1913, an industrial building that still shapes the cityscape today. Dresden thus became the largest German transshipment point for overseas grain with pneumatic unloading.
In the former social and cultural building of the port from 1956, a fish restaurant with a seawater aquarium of over 5,000 liters invites you to linger. Worth seeing in the small museum harbor is, among other things. the over 100 year old barge “Waltraut” and in the large harbor basin the minesweeper “Atlantis” of the German Navy, which was in service from 1968 to 1995.