Karolinenviertel

This guide to Karolinenviertel in Hamburg walks a street of only two hundred eighty-one buildings that somehow holds over four thousand residents, and asks how such a short stretch got so crowded. It traces the district's rise after 1860, when Hamburg tore down its old city walls and land prices sent developers scrambling to build twice over, a tenement facing the street and a hidden second row of housing crammed into the courtyard behind it. Those courtyard dwellings, called Terrasse housing, sat beside a slaughterhouse that gave the whole quarter its older, harsher name before Karolinenstrasse replaced it.