Leipzig

Between 1871 and 1914, Leipzig’s population exploded from 100,000 to roughly 625,000, on its way to a 1930s peak of over 700,000 that briefly made it Germany’s fourth-largest city and, along the way, one of Europe’s fastest-growing metropolises. The answer to housing this flood of factory workers, merchants, and financiers? Build upward, build fast, and make it ornamental. Around 12,500 Gründerzeit buildings rose from former green fields, creating entire districts in historicist dress, neo-Renaissance here, neo-Baroque there. Today, 35% of Leipzig’s flats still occupy these late 19th-century structures, earning it the title of Germany’s monument capital.

The boom produced a very particular kind of building: four or five stories, a shopfront and a merchant’s apartment facing the street, plainer housing for clerks above, and workers’ flats stacked around a rear courtyard, all three classes sharing one address without sharing much else. The Waldstraßenviertel, built out in stages between 1830 and 1900, grew into Germany’s largest contiguous Wilhelminian-era district, and the style spread from there, neo-Renaissance facades in one neighborhood, neo-Baroque flourishes in the next, as if the city couldn’t decide which century it was imitating.

None of it looked ornamental by 1989. A television report that year asked bluntly whether Leipzig could still be saved, and the numbers backed up the alarm: of 257,000 apartments citywide, 196,000 needed renovation, and roughly 25,000 stood empty despite a housing shortage. More than 80 percent of those buildings have since been restored. Germany’s monument capital very nearly didn’t survive long enough to earn the title.