Mönckebergstraße

This guide to Mönckebergstraße in Hamburg begins with the 1892 cholera epidemic that killed more than eight thousand six hundred Hamburgers, worst of all in the cramped Gängeviertel alleys where dock workers' families lived stacked above open drains. It follows mayor Johann Georg Mönckeberg's Senate as it used the outbreak to demolish the slum and push out its surviving residents, replacing it with the grand commercial boulevard that opened in 1909. Walk its eight hundred meters and consider what else this street was built to erase.