St. Catherine Church

This guide to St. Catherine Church in Hamburg starts underground, with eleven hundred larch logs driven into Hamburg's soft riverside mud in the twelve hundreds and still carrying the full weight of the brick Gothic church above. It follows the building upward through its completion by the mid-1400s and the baroque copper spire Hamburg's merchants added in 1657, pushing the tower past a hundred and fifteen meters into the sky. The guide also reaches the night of July 30, 1943, when British bombs gutted the interior during Operation Gomorrah.