Ehrenstraße
Car-free boulevard of designer boutiques and cafes hiding a walled-off former red-light alley.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Ehrenstrasse in Cologne starts with a narrow gap between two blank brick shopfronts and the question of what they were built to hide. It leads you through to Kleine Brinkgasse, a short passage that served for roughly a century and a half as the city's red-light alley, and the nineteen sixties decision to wall it off with a dogleg entrance open only to men. It follows the nineteen seventies fight over relocating the trade to a new high-rise brothel on Hornstrasse, a battle the workers who lived it did not win. Walk the boutiques and cafe tables of today's car-free street and see if you can spot the gap.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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