Jungfernstieg and Reesendamm

The Reesendamm is an inconspicuous stretch of road, next to the canal known as the "Little Alster." Yet it was precisely here that a little-known chapter of Hamburg's history began. Around 1220, the people of Hamburg dammed the Alster here and built watermills to grind barley. Shortly before, a clever mind had reinvented beer: For centuries, it had been brewed from bog myrtle berries and oats; now, he used hops and barley malt. Hops were soon cultivated in large quantities in the surrounding area, as far as Mecklenburg. This didn't happen on a whim. Our rich range of modern beverages was unknown in the Middle Ages. Because drinking water was often brackish or contaminated with germs, people switched to beer as an everyday beverage.Around 1400, 531 breweries operated in Hamburg, with enormous output: the Hanseatic city, which it had been for several decades, produced 575,000 hectoliters of beer annually. Wiechmann explains that four annual productions could fill the entire Inner Alster Lake today. By comparison, Munich only produced a mere 8,000 hectoliters at the time. "Hamburg became the brewery of the Hanseatic League," says Ralf Wiechmann of the Museum of Hamburg History, and delivered beer as far afield as England and Flanders. Hamburg laid the foundation for its wealth with beer brewing.Listen to Ralf Wiechmann on Hamburg's medieval brewing capital here: audio.zeit.de/podcast/ZEIT-WISSEN-Wanderungen/5AufstauungderAlster,%20Jungfernstieg.mp3Photo: Public Domain

Here you can not only stroll wonderfully, there are also many small shops and shops and a walk along the Alster is a must for a visitor to Hamburg.

The Jungfernstieg is a street on the southern bank of the Binnenalster in the center of Hamburg. It runs from the Reesendamm bridge to the Gänsemarkt and is the first street in Germany to be asphalted (1838).
Originally built as Reesendamm for damming the Alster in 1235 under Count Adolf IV of Schauenburg and Holstein, he was the site of the upper mill. One of the oak piles from which the dam was built has been turned into a sculpture by Richard Luksch that can be viewed on the platform of the U1 and commemorates the victims of a water leak during the construction of this station in the 1930s. The Jungfernstieg was Germany's first street, which was already paved in 1838.
After the Great Fire in 1842, a regulation of the Alster was made, their main drain was passed through an old moat under the Reesendammbrücke by the Kleine Alster on the Alsterarkaden, while the old drainage through today's Nikolaifleet was. The south side of the Jungfernstieges was rebuilt. From 1843 to 1881, the first large shopping arcade, Sillem's Bazar, was on Jungfernstieg.
The street was given its name by a bourgeois rite: on the boulevard on Sunday, families took their unmarried ladies, the maidens, for a walk.