Gängeviertel der Neustadt

This guide to the Gängeviertel der Neustadt in Hamburg walks the narrow timber-framed lanes built so tight that stooping through a doorway was simply how you got home, laid out around passages the city once called a Gang rather than a street. It follows why builders stacked each upper floor further into the lane than the one below, a trick called Stockwerkbauweise that squeezed a few more square feet from land the guild rules and city walls never let expand. A household might crowd into one or two ten-square-meter rooms fed by canal water that also carried away the waste, a design that turned deadly when cholera swept through in 1892. Look up as you walk Bäckerbreitergang and you can still see the timber frames leaning toward each other overhead.