Sachsenhausen (the south-bank quarter)

About 60,300 people live in Sachsenhausen, more than in any other Frankfurt district, spread across the largest area in the city. To Frankfurters on the north bank, the people here are die dribb de Bach, Hessian dialect for those across the creek, meaning the Main. Sachsenhausen was never a village that got swallowed up and never an independent town. It has been part of Frankfurt for centuries, formally joined by the Stadtfrieden agreement of 1318 after first appearing in the records in 1193.

The Museumsufer (Museum Embankment) is the reason most visitors come. Museums line up along the south bank like beads on a string: the Städel, the Liebieghaus, the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, the Deutsches Filmmuseum, the Ikonen-Museum and the Museum Giersch among them. The idea came from cultural director Hilmar Hoffmann back in 1977, and a wave of renovations and extensions beginning in 2008 brought the row up to its current form. On the last weekend in August the museums stay open into the night for the Nacht der Museen (Night of the Museums).

The other Sachsenhausen is the one with the cider. Apfelwein, the tart local hard cider, is poured from a blue-and-gray stoneware jug called a Bembel into a ribbed glass called a Geripptes, and the classic place to drink it is a tavern in Alt-Sachsenhausen. Order Handkäs mit Musik alongside it, a translucent sour-milk cheese marinated with onions, and you have the standard Frankfurt evening. Half of Sachsenhausen was destroyed in the war; the postwar decades turned the surviving lanes into the city's going-out quarter, and they have stayed that way.

One tower survives from the 14th-century fortifications that once ringed the quarter, and no attacker ever broke through them: the Kuhhirtenturm (Cowherd's Tower). It was converted into a house, and its most famous resident was the composer Paul Hindemith, who wrote his opera Cardillac there in the 1920s. The most striking building in the district is the neo-Gothic Dreikönigskirche from 1881, whose slender tower is visible from the north bank and whose stained glass is worth the walk inside.