Schwabing-West

This guide to Schwabing-West in Munich traces how the city carved this orderly quarter out of Schwabing, Germany's most notorious bohemian district, in 1909, building tidy Jugendstil apartment blocks as a deliberate rebuke to the artists, poets and revolutionaries next door. Standing on Kurfürstenplatz, named for a seventeenth-century Bavarian elector, you'll hear about a dance hall that opened here in 1915, named for the very bohemia the square was built to erase. Look up at the gabled corner building behind you, built in 1898, before the square even existed.