Fish Market

This guide to Cologne's Fish Market building follows what restoration workers found beneath a slab of nineteen-thirties cement plaster: timber that looked centuries older than the postwar walls around it should allow, in a quarter leveled by bombing in nineteen forty-two, forty-four and forty-five. It traces the twenty-five years the crooked gabled house spent as home to Cologne's federation of visual artists, and the late-Gothic structure that once stood on this spot before the war. Look up at the stepped gable and the scaffolding still holding up walls the city hasn't yet repaired.