Volksgarten

This guide to Volksgarten in Cologne traces how a Prussian fortress, Fort Four, took nine years to build and never fired a shot before being decommissioned as obsolete. It follows the merchant Wilhelm Kaesen, who quietly bought up the surrounding plots and in 1886 sold roughly ten hectares to the city on one condition: that it stay a free public garden. He died the year before a single tree was planted. Look for the rose garden growing inside the old fort's earthworks, and the pond sitting where soldiers once watched for an attack that never came.