Hamburg is unusual, perhaps unique, among the world’s long-established major shipping ports—it’s visibly, everyday and from everywhere a huge cargo port. And it’s huge enough that the entire city of Copenhagen could fit into just the harbor.
In most major port cities, containerization in the 1970s and 80s meant ports had to be moved away from the city centers because of the need for huge spaces to stack and load containers, leaving behind abandoned piers and warehouses to be recycled or left to crumble.
But, while Hamburg has ambitiously been recycling its warehouses into housing, retail, museums and other uses, its harbor along the Elbe River and its tributaries is still front and center to the city, although most of the huge container docks are across from the central districts.
While we were in Hamburg last summer, we took a two-hour harbor tour on a small launch that wove its way around the city-side docks and canals—Hamburg is almost as much a canal city as Venice or Amsterdam—as well as heading out into the larger harbor areas, where we shrank to insignificance among the forests of huge cranes and the huge ships they were loading. That’s our boat in the foreground.
The tours—and there are several companies offering different versions, even a few with English narration—start from a historic point, the St. Pauli Landungsbrücken, or Landing Stages along the inner-city waterfront.
Originally built in the 19th century to moor the passenger liners that made Hamburg one of the main emigration routes for Europeans heading to North America, they are now lined with tour boats, ferries, and snack stands for those who are going aboard, rather than abroad.
Our cruise began on some of the inner waterways, canals and channels that connect the open harbor to the rows and rows of red-brick warehouses in the Speicherstadt—Warehouse City, literally. Many of these are still connected to port uses, but more and more house wholesale dealers, residences, offices. Even new buildings in the area tend to take on the styles and proportions of the old. The whole redevelopment is referred to as HafenCity, or Harbor City.
Some have become museums and amusement spots; above, the German Customs Museum. Nearby, another houses a horror-house type dungeon and the huge scale-model worlds of Miniatur-Wunderland.
With all that water, Hamburg has a lot of bridges. A widely-quoted estimate is that the city has 2,000 of them, although many are only short street crossings over narrow canals. But near the harbor, bigger ones are everywhere.
It’s not a static harbor; construction and maintenance can be seen at many spots along the tour, such as the scene below, where a lock wall is under repair.
The harbor tour is also a sort of architectural tour; there’s more of interest than just the ‘speichers,’ including a number of older buildings with a flair of their own.
Some of the newer buildings are quite unusual in shape. Some reflect the trend toward free forms in recent years, but others clearly are shaped by their specialized functions. And no, this first one is not two dimensional!
But easily the most spectacular of the harbor buildings, of any building in the city, is Hamburg’s new symphony hall, the Elbphilharmonie. Built on top of a disused warehouse that is its base, it combines three concert halls, a 244-room hotel and apartments, built out on a spit of land in the harbor. It’s also the tallest occupied building in Hamburg.
For all its magnificence, it has also been a subject of controversy in the city; it was started in 2007 as a three-year project costing €200 million, and ended up taking ten years to complete at a cost of over €870 million.
Its wave-like roof, meant to suggest water, sails and waves, can be seen from quite a distance, above its surroundings.
While the great trans-Atlantic liners and the emigrant ships are long gone, Hamburg’s waterfront still serves passengers; the city is Germany’s major cruise port, and a number of cruisers were in town as we passed.
We also saw quite a few types of smaller ships and boats in the harbor, but they’re for another day, another blog. But here are a couple of military ships for now, both retired, the frigate from the German navy in 1988, and the submarine from Russia in 2002. Both serve as museums.
Among the fascinating features we passed were several huge floating docks, such as this one. They are open to the sea, and the dock lowers itself into the water by filling tanks, allowing a ship to enter; the ends are then sealed and the water pumped out, leaving the ship dry and ready for repair.
But the big business that keeps the harbor going are the container piers. Hamburg jumped into containerization ahead of most ports, and has a reputation for fast turn-around, with masses of cranes to move the truck-sized containers on and off quickly. It’s recently signed a contract with a company that will install even more robotic cranes.
Ships are moored next to the cranes, whose arms are positioned over the stacks of containers on the ship’s deck and down through the deck into the hold. The larger ships can hold thousands of containers. Mol Tribute, below, is one of the world’s largest, and can carry over 20,000 containers. Once off the ships, the containers are placed on trucks to leave the port.
Some of the container ships are more specialized; Atlantic Sun is designed to carry vehicle shipments, and has rear doors that allow vehicles to roll on/roll off. It can carry 1,300 cars, or 3,800 containers.
And, last but not least, Hamburg is a major port for scrap metal export—including containers that have done their time. In all, a fascinating two hours on the waters of Hamburg’s harbor. And if you feel like more boats and water after, it’s only a short bus ride to the old warehouse that houses the city’s Maritime Museum, with thousands of models.
