At 58 meters tall - just a little taller than the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but with considerably more heft - the St. Pauli bunker in Hamburg, Germany, has dominated the city skyline for just over 80 years.
Built using forced labor during Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, it’s a relic of the darkest period in Germany’s history - but this concrete hulk has had a surprising rebirth.
The relaunched Hamburg Bunker is now packed with two restaurants, a five-story Hard Rock Hotel and a newly built pyramid-like rooftop bar and garden from which greenery flows abundantly over the concrete facade.
The REVERB by Hard Rock is a fitting addition to a city with an impressive musical history – this is, after all, where The Beatles began their career at the start of the 1960s.
The Karoviertel neighborhood in which the fortress-like bunker sits is a cool enclave filled with stylish coffee shops and vintage stores, plus the Knust nightclub in a repurposed abattoir.
Rooms in the 134-key REVERB range from 180 euros for a classic room, with amenities including a 55-inch flat screen TV and Alexa in-room assistant, to 269 euros for a suite with sweeping citywide views.
The hotel also has the kind of modern details you’d expect in any self-respecting hip hotel, such as self check-in, smart technology and co-working spaces.
You don’t have to be a hotel guest to enjoy the bunker’s amenities, however. On the ground level, there’s the Constant Grind coffee shop and bar, and a Rock Shop for those seeking Hard Rock merch.
The interiors have a stylish industrial feel. (Ulrich Perrey / dpa)
Bar-restaurant Karo & Paul, by German TV chef Frank Rosin, opened as a bar in April 2024 and occupies the first three levels of the building. The restaurant area is still coming soon.
The restaurant La Sala – Spanish for living room - is open for business on the fifth floor, offering lofty views and an international menu.
Finally at the top is the Green Beanie roof garden, with bar and walkway looping round the building, which can be accessed by the public for free.
The Hamburg bunker was one of eight flak towers – above-ground anti-aircraft bunkers which doubled as air raid shelters - which Germany built after British air raids on Berlin in 1940.
The history the Hamburg Bunker wears is heavy, but a 76,000-tonne concrete behemoth with walls 2.5 meters thick can’t be easily demolished or ignored.
The only flak tower to have been completely destroyed is one at Berlin’s zoo, as the others are in heavily populated areas where the explosives involved would be too great a risk, AFP reports.
“The idea of raising the height of the building with greenery was to add something peaceful and positive to this massive block left over from the Nazi dictatorship,” Anita Engels, from the Hilldegarden neighborhood association which supported the project, told AFP.
The association has helped with this new chapter in the Hamburg flak tower’s history by collecting testimonies from people who lived in the wartime bunker as well as records of the hundreds of forced laborers who built it.
An exhibition on the first floor now tells the full story of the building’s history.
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Transport Canada has issued a recall for 38,000 General Motors (GM) vehicles for safety risks related to a software glitch, the agency reported in a notice on Wednesday.
Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander and other senior figures in the Lebanese movement in an airstrike on Beirut on Friday, vowing to press on with a new military campaign until it is able to secure the area around the Lebanese border.
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The search for a missing six-year-old boy in Shamattawa is continuing Friday as RCMP hope recent tips can help lead to a happy conclusion.
A 15-year-old boy who was the subject of an emergency alert in New Brunswick has been arrested.
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Michael Ford, Ontario's minister of citizenship and multiculturalism, says he is taking a leave of absence from cabinet to prioritize his health.
Lawyers in Britain representing dozens of alleged victims -- including three Canadians -- of Mohamed Al Fayed, the former boss of Harrods, said Friday their clients assert that he was a "monster" who raped and sexually abused young women.
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Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador blamed the United States in part on Thursday for the surge in cartel violence terrorizing the northern state of Sinaloa which has left at least 30 people dead in the past week.
A UN human rights expert warned on Friday that gang violence is spreading across Haiti as a UN-backed mission targeting criminals in the troubled Caribbean country remains underfunded and understaffed.
Communication breakdowns with local law enforcement hampered the Secret Service's performance ahead of a July assassination attempt on former U.S. president Donald Trump, according to a new report that lays out a litany of missed opportunities to stop a gunman who opened fire from an unsecured roof.
The NDP is asking the Competition Bureau to investigate whether Canadian landlords are using the same AI software that sparked an antitrust lawsuit in the United States.
As Ottawa moves to include graduate students in its cap on international study permits, experts and advocates alike are raising questions about the need for the move, and suggesting it could prompt top talent to look elsewhere.
Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly is convening female foreign ministers from a dozen countries to talk about women's participation in governance and issues like online harassment.
Whooping cough is on track to reach a record number of cases in Ontario while infections climb in eastern provinces and decline in Quebec, but experts say trying to predict the course of the highly contagious disease has been especially difficult this year.
A Nova Scotia woman has applied for a medically assisted death, saying after years of battling to receive out-of-country surgery for an illness that causes 'indescribable' pain, she struggles to maintain the will to live.
The Nunavut government says it will provide immunization against respiratory syncytial virus to all infants in the territory this fall, a policy change that one pediatric infectious diseases specialist has been advocating for decades.
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NASA scientists have successfully replicated spider-like shapes found on the surface of Mars in a laboratory setting for the first time.
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Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem says there is a lot of uncertainty around how artificial intelligence could affect the economy moving forward, including the labour market and price growth.
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Ontario Provincial Police say three suspects from southern Ontario have been charged and drugs worth $300,000 have been seized following a traffic stop Sept. 16.
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Newfoundland and Labrador's chief medical officer is monitoring the rise of whooping cough infections across the province as cases of the highly contagious disease continue to grow across Canada.
A 16-year-old biennial event aimed at fostering business in the country's eastern Arctic and northern regions has been cancelled indefinitely as a dispute unfolds between Inuit in Canada and a Labrador group claiming to share their heritage.
Jim Lester’s farm hopped on the cow-cuddling trend in early August, and his time slots have been pretty well sold out ever since.
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