Taunusanlage & the Skyscrapers

Frankfurt is a genuinely improbable city. Europe's financial capital, home to the European Central Bank, seat of the continent's largest stock exchange, is a place of 760,000 people surrounded by apple orchards and beech forest, where residents drink fermented cider from grey stoneware jugs and maintain strong opinions about the correct preparation of cold herb sauce. The glass towers visible from thirty kilometres away are not, in any deep sense, what Frankfurt is. They are something that happened to it.

The Taunusanlage is the best place to see this. A narrow strip of parkland along the northern edge of the financial district, planted with old plane trees, crossed by gravel paths. Sit on a bench here at noon and you have Deutsche Bank to your left, a man feeding pigeons to your right, a dog off its lead somewhere behind you, and thirty floors of glass above all of it. Nobody seems particularly bothered. That easy coexistence of the monumental and the ordinary is part of what makes Frankfurt interesting.

How the towers got there

The skyline was not planned. When West Germany needed to rebuild its financial system after 1945, Frankfurt was chosen as home for the new central bank for reasons rooted in political caution. Berlin was too loaded a symbol; Frankfurt was functional, neutral, already equipped with the necessary infrastructure. The banks followed. The towers followed the banks. Nobody sat down to design a skyline. It assembled itself, over decades, out of institutional logic.

What emerged was, by accident, one of the more recognisable urban profiles in the world. The Commerzbank Tower, completed in 1997 to Norman Foster's design, was Europe's tallest building at the time. Its most notable feature had nothing to do with height. A series of sky gardens spirals up the building's interior, bringing daylight and greenery into spaces that in any comparable office tower would be corridors and meeting rooms. An attempt to make a very large building livable. In the context of 1990s commercial architecture, that was a less obvious ambition than it sounds now.

The park and what it replaced

The Taunusanlage was laid out on the site of Frankfurt's old city fortifications. The walls came down in the 19th century not because they were obsolete but because the city was growing and the land was needed. In their place, a ring of linked parks was built around the old town. The Taunusanlage is the western portion of that ring. Frankfurters have been using it for lunch breaks and evening walks for over a hundred and fifty years. The towers are relatively recent additions to a much older scene.

Richard David Precht has argued that cities express their actual priorities in the spaces they build and maintain. Not in their stated values, but in what they keep, what they fund, what they put back after it wears out. Frankfurt's public record on this is genuinely mixed. The financial infrastructure is here, yes. So is the park. Both have been carefully maintained across generations. The bench by the fountain did not survive through indifference. Someone kept choosing to put it back.

Walking it

Start at Taunusanlage station and walk west toward Gallusanlage. The full stretch is just under a kilometre. On the return, take Kaiserstraße or Neue Mainzer Straße through the Bankenviertel for the sense of what the towers look like from the pavement below. The Kleinmarkthalle, Frankfurt's covered food market, is about ten minutes' walk from the eastern end and makes a sensible finishing point for the morning.