Cologne Zoo

This guide to Cologne Zoo's cable car opens with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer gripping the handrail as it swung him out over the Rhine in the spring of nineteen fifty-seven, on a ride built just for a garden show. It traces how the line, strung by the Cologne firm Julius Pohlig, became the first cable car in Europe built to cross a river, gliding at a gentle ten kilometers an hour while barges and gulls drift by below. In nineteen sixty-three the whole system came down to make way for a new bridge, and for three years the only crossing here was on foot or by tram.