Bahnhofstrasse

This guide to Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich opens with a strange fact: not one banker has ever been convicted for breaking Switzerland's most famous banking secrecy law. It traces the street from 1864, when a moat called the Froschengraben was filled in and paved over, through 1934, when a new law made it a crime for a banker to reveal a client's name. By the 1960s a handful of banks along this street and Paradeplatz held nearly half of everything Swiss banks kept on deposit, much of it belonging to foreigners who never set foot here. In 1964 an angry British minister accused unnamed Swiss financiers of hoarding treasure underground, and the nickname stuck to the street ever since.