Rote Flora

This guide to Hamburg's Rote Flora opens with the price the city accepted for the entire building in 2001, and works backward to explain why that number is so strange. You'll hear how it began in 1888 as a grand concert house named after a scrapped riverboat, then passed through decades as a cinema and a kitchenware store, before a planned 1980s production of The Phantom of the Opera triggered a neighborhood occupation. Along the way it traces the standoff between the city and the building's occupants across the years that followed. Look for the red paint and layered posters still covering the facade.