Deichstraße

This guide to Deichstrasse in Hamburg opens just after one in the morning on the fifth of May 1842, when a neighbor smelled smoke from a cigar factory on this street and a fire began that would burn for three and a half days, killing fifty-one people and destroying a third of Hamburg's old town. It follows how a shifting wind decided which buildings the flames reached and which timber-framed houses were left standing along the canal. Those same houses faced a second threat in 1972, when city planners wanted the row demolished to make way for traffic.