Innenstadt (downtown)

The Innenstadt holds about 6,700 residents on 0.6 square miles, wedged between the banking district, the Bahnhofsviertel, the Westend and the Hauptwache. In the 14th century this was still open ground outside the city walls. Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian gave Frankfurt permission to build beyond them in 1333, five new city gates went up, and a row of houses appeared along what had been the cattle market. That row is why the city's main shopping street is called the Zeil, German for a line of buildings.

Modernization came fast. Trams started running in 1897, the first big department stores opened on the Zeil, and after the war the district was rebuilt from scratch into the 1960s. Frankfurt's subway opened in 1963 with underground stations at the Hauptwache and the Konstablerwache, and the Zeil and the Freßgass were turned into pedestrian streets. The Kaiserstraße, laid out on a Parisian model, and the grand hotels around Kaiserplatz survive from the boom years after 1866.

West of the shopping streets, across the Taunusanlage park, stands the Bankenviertel. Most banks and financial firms sit along the Neue Mainzer Straße, the Große Gallusstraße and the Junghofstraße, and the tallest of them, the Commerzbank Tower, reaches about 984 feet. Walking the Neue Mainzer Straße between the towers is the closest thing Germany has to a Wall Street canyon. The stock exchange, Frankfurt's oldest financial institution, sits in the middle of it.

The Opernviertel (opera quarter) is the elegant end of downtown. The Bockenheimer Straße runs between Rathenauplatz and Opernplatz and includes the Freßgass, a street whose nickname roughly translates as feeding alley and whose restaurants earn it. One block over, the Goethestraße is by a wide margin the most expensive shopping street in the city, and the Opernplatz in front of the Alte Oper is arguably the prettiest square in Frankfurt.