Gutleutviertel

Roughly 6,900 people live in the Gutleutviertel on about 0.85 square miles. For most of its history this was not a village or a structured quarter at all, just the estate and its farmland outside the Frankfurt gates. The Galgentor city gate stood nearby, along with the gallows, which the city fathers finally removed only when Napoleon came to visit.

Goethe evidently enjoyed himself out here. He described a yearly festival on the common pastures, when the cattle herds of the surrounding area were gathered and the herders and their sweethearts celebrated with dancing and singing and, in his words, a fair amount of high spirits and misbehavior.

Industry replaced the rural idyll, and when the industrial age ended the district managed the structural shift better than most parts of Frankfurt. The farm that gave the quarter its name did not survive it: unprotected by any heritage listing, it was demolished in the 1970s to make room for a vocational school center.

The transformation is most visible at the Westhafen, the old western harbor rebuilt into a glass-fronted waterfront quarter that now represents modern urban Frankfurt in most photographs of the type. It is handsome and it is expensive. Renovations keep pushing rents up, and long-term residents are steadily being priced out, a tension that runs through local politics here.