The Mainhattan Paradox

Frankfurt is the only major European city that was almost entirely destroyed in WWII and then built itself back twice — first into a glass-tower financial capital unlike anything on the continent, then into an obsessive reconstruction of the medieval Altstadt it had lost. The Dom-Römer project rebuilt 35 historic houses from historical records over a decade. Frankfurt now contains, within walking distance, the densest concentration of postwar skyscrapers in continental Europe and the most literally reconstructed medieval quarter of any German city.

The Museumsufer amplifies this. Fifteen world-class museums occupy a two-kilometer stretch of the south bank — sculpture, film, applied arts, architecture, ethnography, communications — built with municipal ambition starting in the late 20th century and now rivaling any museum mile in the world. On a single day you can walk from a Hellenistic bronze collection through 700 years of European painting into a restored early 20th-century cinema. Frankfurt rewards the traveler who ignores the airport and the trade fair and stays for the city underneath.