Author: Clint Swift

The Harbor City (Hafenstadt) quarter is where the largest inner-city redevelopment project on the Continent is to be completed between 2020 and 2030. Old warehouses that used to be part of Hamburg’s free-zone port are being replaced with offices, hotels, shops, museums and (largely upscale) residential areas. At nearly 400 acres, this city within a…

Hamburg’s symbolic heart, the impressive neo-Renaissance sandstone City Hall (Rathaus), dominates the center of town. The Rathaus, built at the end of the 19th century,  is home to the city’s senate and parliament. City Hall (green roof) and the rest of Hamburg welcomed the Rotarians with blue flags. Even the saintly swans were in attendance.…

For centuries, community life in German cities and towns centered on the church. In many places, it still does. Hamburg’s “senior” church probably is St. Michael’s. St. Michaelis — or “Michel,” as Hamburg residents call it — is a city landmark and one of the most famous Baroque-style churches in northern Germany. Spend some time…

Leave it to a sea-faring city to do a Maritime Museum right! Lisbon, a fabled sea power, boasts a magical museum with life-size ships from centuries past. Hamburg’s museum bills itself as the world’s largest private maritime collection, and it is big. This post necessarily may be the most impressionistic from Hamburg. The Maritime Museum…

The “green heart” of Hamburg is its largest park, called “Plants and Flowers” (Planten und Blomen). It runs from St. Pauli, near the harbor, up through the center of the city. A little astonishing to find this much green in the middle of Germany’s second-largest city. Walking from one end of the park to the…

History is notoriously tough on castles, and Schloss Bergedorf is no exception. A “castle” has stood on this spot, about 10 miles southeast of Hamburg center, since the first quarter of the 13th Century. But since then, war and other developments have led to a series of changes in design and ownership. One guidebook calls…

The best feature of our hotel was its proximity to Hamburg’s big lake, the Outer Alster. Hundreds of years ago, the Alster River was dammed and formed two lakes that make a figure 8. The smaller lake, nearer the city center, is the Inner Alster. The 4- to 5-mile path around the lake can be…