Ehrenfeld

This guide to Ehrenfeld in Cologne climbs a forty-four-metre brick tower that has blinked through the night for more than a century, despite Cologne sitting nearly two hundred kilometers from open water. It traces the 1890s industrial boomtown behind it, when the Helios company built generators, streetcars and real lighthouses for the mouth of the Weser and islands like Borkum and Sylt, testing its lamps on a tower of its own. Overextended, Helios was swallowed by the Berlin giant AEG in 1905, and the factory that raised the tower closed its doors in 1930.