Bockenheim

Just under 40,000 people live in Bockenheim, spread over about 3.1 square miles, which makes it the most populous district in Frankfurt. Its center lies roughly two miles from downtown. Settlement here goes back to the Neolithic, but the first document naming the place is a deed of gift written between 768 and 778, when the village was handed to Lorsch Abbey. It passed through Hanau-Münzenberg and Hessen-Kassel, was granted town rights in 1819, and made a name for itself as an industrial site in the 19th century. Frankfurt finally absorbed the town on April 1, 1895.

The lifeline of the district is the Leipziger Straße, 780 meters of it, a bit under half a mile, running from the Bockenheimer Warte to the Friesengasse. Trams ran along it until 1965, and it was one of the first one-way streets in Germany. Shops, workshops, small cafés, pubs and market stalls line it end to end, and residents rarely need to leave the quarter to get anything done.

The university is the other defining feature. Goethe University's main campus formally moved to the neighboring Westend in 2001, but students never really left Bockenheim, and the bars and cheap kitchens around the old campus still set the tone in the evening. If you want a night out in a place that has never bothered to smarten itself up, this is it.

Bockenheim and Frankfurt grew together long before the formal incorporation in 1895, and the district still insists on its own identity. Practically, its best feature for visitors is location: the Messe Frankfurt fairgrounds are immediately to the southeast, which makes this one of the shorter walks to a trade fair hall you will find in any major German city.