Peterstraße

This guide to Peterstraße in Hamburg starts by admitting that every timbered gable and brick front around you is a copy or a salvaged fragment, none of it born on this stretch of ground. You'll hear what actually stood here before Allied bombs flattened old Hamburg: mostly poor Jewish tradespeople's shops, not the wealthy merchant houses the street now imitates. The guide follows grain merchant Alfred Toepfer's decades-long project to rebuild the street from scattered old materials, and the one genuinely original building on it, the Beyling-Stift, built as low-rent housing rather than a showpiece.