For most of its life the square did a plain job: it sold grain. A salt house stood in the middle of it from about 1407, and in 1535 it was converted into a cloth hall and dance floor, since until then only the town hall had anywhere for the better sort to dance. Grain came in from the Upper Lusatian countryside in quantities the square could barely absorb - on 19 July 1804 there were 754 loaded carts crowded onto it. Earlier, in January 1451, the Franciscan preacher John of Capistrano had a pulpit built in front of the salt house and delivered fifteen sermons from it. The town fire of 1717 destroyed every building on the north and west sides, which is why the oldest houses here are nearly five centuries younger than the square they stand on.

Three buildings anchor the western end, and each has collected a nickname. The Dreifaltigkeitskirche began as a Franciscan monastery church, consecrated on 21 August 1245; its Gothic choir, built between 1371 and 1381, is the oldest Gothic work in Görlitz, and the bell turret above it has been called the Mönch - the Monk - for centuries. In the Barbara Chapel hangs the Goldene Maria, a winged altarpiece made in a Breslau workshop between 1510 and 1515, beneath a vault painting of thirty-two angels that nobody laid eyes on between the Reformation and 1909. Beside it the Reichenbach Tower rises 51 metres, first recorded in 1376, given a battlemented drum in 1485 and a copper Baroque dome in 1782; its last tower keeper moved his family out in 1904. Next to that squats the Kaisertrutz, a bastion that earned its name in 1641 by defying imperial and Saxon troops while Swedish forces held the town.

On 9 November 1918 a crowd gathered outside the Kaisertrutz, then the main guardhouse, broke the military prisoners out and ran a red flag up the roof; the duty officers could not stop them. A decade later Paul von Hindenburg was greeted from private windows with the black-white-red of the vanished empire, while only the public buildings flew the republic's black-red-gold. On 6 October 1940 the battalions of Infantry Regiment 30 marched back from Poland and France through a gate of honour hung with swastikas. In 1951 the square was formally renamed Leninplatz, a decision the town declined to adopt in speech - there was still a Lower Market, and now apparently no Upper one. On 17 June 1953 several thousand people filled it demanding new elections and lower prices. The radio dealer Artur Hellwig lent them his loudspeaker and received ten years for it. His younger colleague Horst Kanzog got six.

The square's Jewish shopkeepers were stripped of their businesses under the programme the regime called Aryanisation. Jakob Abramowitz lost his menswear shop at No. 11, Paul Kafka his shoe shop on the Steinstraße corner, the Meirowsky brothers their clothing store at No. 7. Artur Dresel, a Social Democrat who had held many unpaid civic offices, was accused of molesting a teenage customer during a fitting; the local paper and Der Stürmer printed everything they could invent. The court acquitted him. He was sent to the prison in Breslau anyway, where he is said to have taken his own life, and at a trial in Bautzen in 1948 it emerged that a resentful neighbourhood craftsman had denounced him. Above the funeral parlour at No. 15, a group of dismissed Social Democrats under Wilhelm Baumgart printed leaflets, carried material in from occupied Czechoslovakia and helped French prisoners. One of them, Willy Leisten, outlived the Nazis and died in a Soviet camp.

After the war the square held more residents than at any point in its history. The 1949/50 address book lists 245 tenants in 32 houses, several families to a flat, thirty-four people in one building alone. Many were refugees from Silesia; many others had walked a few hundred metres across a bridge, because their homes were the eastern suburbs of Görlitz, now the Polish town of Zgorzelec. Among those who came back was a Jewish tenant the Nazis had driven out, who reopened the Abramowitz textile shop at No. 11. On 27 September 1990 Helmut Kohl spoke here to a crowd the Dresdner Morgenpost put at 25,000; puzzled by an unfamiliar gold and white flag, he asked what it meant and opened by addressing them as Lower Silesians. Willy Brandt came in November and drew far fewer. The Ullrich funeral home, founded in 1893, is now the oldest business on the square.