MAIN TOWER

This guide to MAIN TOWER in Frankfurt opens with a puzzle: a city of only 750,000 people whose skyline handles more money than almost anywhere else on the continent. It traces that back to the night of March 22, 1944, when Allied bombing burned out more than eighty percent of the old town and left some 180,000 people homeless by morning, and to the decades afterward when Frankfurt built upward instead of back, earning the nickname Mainhattan. The tower has risen into that skyline since 1999, and its deck is the only public spot that looks down over both the modern banking district and a patch of old town rebuilt on its original footprint. Give yourself time at the railing to pick out both below.