The old free imperial city and Hanseatic town of Nordhausen lies on the river Zorge, in the northwest of the Goldene Aue. This "gateway to the Southern Harz" is now an important traffic junction and a considerable industrial town. Two well-known local products are Nordhausen Doppelkorn (a rye spirit) and Nordhausen chewing tobacco.
In the Markt of Nordhausen is the three-story Old Town Hall (1360; rebuilt in Late Renaissance style 1610; restored after 1945), with an arcade on the ground floor and a staircase tower topped by a double lantern.
On the west side is a figure of Roland (1717), a symbol of municipal authority since at least 1411, on the east side a memorial (by J. von Woyski) to the victims of air raids on the town in 1945.
Of Nordhausen's few surviving burghers' houses, the most interesting are a half-timbered house of 1500 at Barfüsserstrasse 6, one of the finest secular buildings in the town; the Finkenburg, a Gothic half-timbered building (c. 1550) on the Wassertreppe; and a half-timbered house of Lower Saxon type (c. 1550) at Domstrasse 12.
At Alexander-Puschkin-Strasse 31 in Nordhausen is the Meyenburg Museum (local finds of the prehistoric and early historical periods, results of research on the old town, furniture, porcelain, tomb brasses and coins; small ethnographic collection).
The parish church of St Blaise (15th c.) in Nordhausen, a Late Gothic hall-church with groined vaulting, has a Late Romanesque west work with two octagonal towers; fine pulpit of 1592.
The Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Nordhausen, founded by Queen Mathilde in 962 as the church of a nunnery which in 1220 was converted by the Emperor Frederick II into a house of secular canons, is a Gothic hall-church (14thC.) with reticulated vaulting (16th C.) and octagonal pillars. It has a finely furnished interior, with a Baroque high altar (1726), 14th and 15th C grave-slabs and a tabernacle of 1455.
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