Stadtpark

This guide to Stadtpark in Hamburg opens with architect Fritz Schumacher arguing against elegant flowerbeds and for a park built to be trampled: football pitches, swimming water, and grass for the working families crammed into nearby tenements. It follows the park from its 1901 planning through its 1914 opening, and the plain water tower that engineer Oskar Menzel raised on the western skyline between 1912 and 1915 to supply drinking water to the district. Look up at that tower and consider what a dry, useless water tower could still become.