Nordend

With about 53,300 residents on 1.8 square miles, the Nordend has the highest population density of any Frankfurt district and the second-largest population after Sachsenhausen. There were settlements here in antiquity, including a Roman villa and farm where the Günthersburgpark is today. Medieval royal estates became the country holdings of Frankfurt's patrician families, and one of them, the 16th-century Kühhornshof, still stands in part as a tower. Street names across the quarter still point back to those farms.

What defines the Nordend visually is the Gründerzeit, the building boom of the second half of the 19th century. The quarter got its name around 1850, when it really was the northern limit of the built-up city, and it grew into the gap between Bornheim and the old core. Space was tight and the new boulevards ate into it, so the houses went up instead of out. Most run to four stories, in neo-Renaissance and late classicist dress, and the streetscape is unusually continuous for a city that lost so much in the war.

One building here carries a peculiar Frankfurt grievance. The city was so confident of becoming the capital of West Germany that it built a plenary chamber for the Bundestag at the northern edge of the Nordend. Bonn won the vote, the Hessischer Rundfunk broadcaster moved into the hall instead, and Frankfurters still call its gilded foyer the Goldhalle. Concerts by the broadcaster's symphony orchestra and big band take place in the adjoining hall.

The Hauptfriedhof, laid out in 1828, is both the city's largest cemetery and one of the quarter's quiet attractions, with more than 80,000 graves. Arthur Schopenhauer is buried here, as are a number of the thinkers and industrialists who shaped modern Frankfurt.