Eiserner Steg

This guide to the Eiserner Steg in Frankfurt starts with a question the city didn't mean to test: how many padlocks a footbridge can carry before it strains. It traces the bridge back to 1868 and 1869, when Frankfurt citizens funded their own crossing between the old city and Sachsenhausen through a public company, and follows it through a 1912 rebuild in riveted steel and the night in March 1945 when retreating soldiers blew it up. Look at the railings and picture the tens of thousands of locks that were cleared from them in 2025, now sitting in a city warehouse.