Bornheim: Berger Straße

There is a kilometre of Frankfurt that the 20th century largely forgot to touch, and because of that oversight it became the most interesting street in the city. Berger Straße in Bornheim is not a tourist destination, a shopping experience or a cultural attraction. It is a street where people live, and the shops and cafés and bars that have grown up around them over many decades give the whole thing a texture that cannot be manufactured from scratch.

Bornheim was a separate village until Frankfurt absorbed it in the 1890s. The old village structure survived: a main street, the lanes branching off it, the church at one end, the market square. It then survived the bombing of 1944, the reconstruction of the 1950s and 1960s, and the various waves of redevelopment that remade most of the rest of the city in a different image. What remains is not charming in the way that restored old towns are charming. It is messier, more various, more honestly itself.

What the street contains

Walk Berger Straße on a Saturday morning and you pass through an unplanned sequence of what a working city street can hold. A Turkish bakery near the south end, simit in the window and the smell of sesame in the air. Three independent bookshops in 400 metres. A wine bar that has been in the same spot since the 1980s without visibly updating its approach to interior design. A flower market. Two competing Italian coffee places. A fishmonger. A cheese shop. A hardware store. An organic supermarket that arrived fifteen years ago and was absorbed by the street without any particular fuss.

The tram runs through the middle of the road and stops every few hundred metres, which slows traffic to walking pace and turns the whole street into something you cross and recross without thinking. People stand on corners talking. Dogs wait outside shops. Children walk home through the lanes on either side. It is ordinary in the specific way that good urban life is ordinary: functional, inhabited, structured around the people who are actually there rather than the people who might one day be persuaded to visit.

The neighbourhood around it

Bornheim beyond Berger Straße has the same quality of accumulated use. The streets around it, Sandweg and Rotlintstraße and the lanes near the Alt-Bornheim church, contain independent restaurants of a dozen nationalities, bars that fill late, a neighbourhood that has been consistently popular with students and young families for decades without becoming a version of itself aimed at visitors. The equilibrium is fragile and will not hold indefinitely. For the moment it holds.

Maya Göpel makes the point that the places which matter in cities are usually the ones that came into being without being planned as places that matter. They accumulated rather than being designed. Berger Straße accumulated. That is what you can feel walking along it, and it is the thing that is hardest to explain to someone who has not been there.