Hamburg

Site

Hamburg stands at the northern extremity of the lower Elbe valley, which at that point is between 5 and 8 miles (8 and 13 km) wide. To the southeast of the old city, the Elbe divides itself into two branches, the Norderelbe and the Süderelbe, but these branches meet again opposite Altona, just west of the old city, to form the Unterelbe, which flows into the North Sea some 65 miles downstream from Hamburg. Two other rivers flow into the Elbe at Hamburg—the Alster from the north and the Bille from the east.

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The city layout

The nucleus of the city is the Altstadt (Old Town), the former medieval settlement, bounded by the harbour and by a string of roads that follow the line of the old fortifications. Within this core there are few great buildings to remind the visitor of the city’s thousand-year history apart from the five principal churches—Sankt Jacobi, Sankt Petri, Sankt Katharinen, Sankt Nikolai, and Sankt Michaelis—and none of these is in its original condition. Fire has destroyed almost all the older residences and warehouses, and what was left untouched by conflagration has often been rebuilt for contemporary purposes. There are, however, a few scattered survivals of older buildings. Moreover, the layout of the old city centre can still be detected in some of the ancient street names and in the Fleete (canals), which connect the Alster with the docks on the Elbe. One of the best views of the inner city is to be enjoyed from the Lombardsbrücke (Lombard Bridge), whence the towers of the five churches can be seen rising high against a skyline that is still relatively harmonious despite the presence of modern skyscrapers.

At the heart of Hamburg is a lake, measuring 455 acres (184 hectares), formed by the damming of the Alster and divided by the Lombardsbrücke into the Binnenalster (Inner Alster) and the Aussenalster (Outer Alster). Around the latter are elegant suburbs such as Rotherbaum, Harvesterhude, and Uhlenhorst. Many waterways, navigable by pleasure boats, run into the Aussenalster.

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Architecture

The last intact ensemble of traditional Hamburg architecture is to be found in the Deichstrasse, one side of which backs onto the Nikolai canal. Its tall, narrow houses, resembling those of Amsterdam, were originally built from the 17th through the 19th century. It was in one of them, number 42, now a restaurant, that the devastating fire of 1842 broke out. Afterward the houses were rebuilt in the old style. Today the street is a protected area, and in recent years it has undergone extensive restoration. Many traditional restaurants are found there.

Another survival of older architecture is in the Krameramtswohnungen, near Sankt Michaelis. Consisting of two half-timbered brick buildings on either side of a narrow courtyard, it was built as a series of dwellings for the widows of shopkeepers and is the only surviving 17th-century construction of its kind in the city. Thoroughly restored between 1971 and 1974, it now forms a delightful secluded alleyway housing a restaurant, small shops, and a branch of the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (Museum of Hamburg History).

Of Hamburg’s five great churches, the most imposing is probably Sankt Michaelis, an 18th-century Baroque-style Protestant church with a rich white-and-gold interior. It was destroyed by fire in 1906, rebuilt, devastated again during World War II, and restored yet again after the war.

The prosperous years 1890–1910 brought an abundance of fine architecture, examples of which can be seen in the spacious and elegant patrician houses around the Aussenalster. Many of these are now occupied by consulates. Another period of architectural flowering came in the 1920s and 1930s when there was a revival of the use of the traditional north German dark red brick as a building material, led by the architects Fritz Höger and Fritz Schumacher. A good example is Höger’s Chilehaus, a massive office building constructed between 1922 and 1924.

More recently Hamburg has acquired its quota of starkly functional modern buildings, such as the Congress Centrum (Congress Centre; opened 1973) and the Fernsehturm (Television Tower), 271.5 metres (891 feet) high, but there is now a strong tendency to renovate old houses rather than to demolish and build afresh. Thus the townscape of Hamburg as a whole has a human quality lacking in many German cities.