Kaiserpassage

The Kaiserpassage is a long, glass-roofed pedestrian walkway connecting the Kaiserstrasse to the Hauptbahnhof. It opened in nineteen seventy-eight, replacing an older, subterranean shopping tunnel that had grown notorious for crime. City planners designed this new version to be bright, airy, and difficult to hide in. A businessman named Karl-Heinrich Ulrich once spent years trying to convince the city to modernize this exact stretch, arguing that the dark corridors underneath the street paralyzed the local economy and ruined the neighborhood reputation.