Europaturm

Stand at the base and tilt your head back. A smooth grey column of concrete rises straight up from the green edge of the city. It keeps going long after your neck tells you to stop. High above, a wide pod rings the shaft, and a thin antenna rises above it into the haze. Listen for a moment. You may hear wind moving through the trees of the nearby park and traffic murmuring along the roads. The tower itself makes no sound at all.

This is the Europaturm, Frankfurt's telecommunications tower. With its antenna, it reaches roughly 337 metres. That makes it the tallest structure in the city, taller than any of the glass banking towers downtown. It is also one of the tallest towers in Germany. Only the television tower in Berlin rises higher. Most visitors photograph the skyscrapers by the River Main and never realise that the real high point of Frankfurt stands out here, among the residential streets.

Locals rarely call it the Europaturm. Their name for it is the Ginnheimer Spargel, which means the Ginnheim asparagus. Ginnheim is the neighbourhood at its foot. Look at the shape again and the joke makes sense. The pale shaft and the swelling top look like a single spear of white asparagus. That vegetable is a beloved seasonal treat in this part of Germany. Here is a small surprise: the tower does not officially stand in Ginnheim. Its plot lies just across the district line, in Bockenheim. The nickname stuck anyway.

Construction took place through the 1970s, and the tower was completed in 1979. This was a period when West Germany was building a national network of radio and television towers. These tall concrete masts carried broadcast signals and directional radio links across the country, long before fibre optic cables and satellites took over much of that work. Frankfurt was already a centre of finance and transport. It also needed to be a strong node in this communications web, and this tower was built for that job.

The tower still does that work today. It belongs to the telecommunications infrastructure of Deutsche Telekom, through its tower-operating company. Antennas on the pod and the mast carry radio broadcasting, mobile phone networks, and other signals. So when you look up, you are not looking at a monument from a finished era. You are looking at working equipment. Some of the signals in your own phone right now may pass through the dishes high above you.

Now look closely at the pod, the wide section near the top. It holds several levels of technical rooms and platforms. For two decades, part of it also belonged to the public. There was a revolving restaurant, and later a nightclub, where people danced high above the city. Frankfurt residents who grew up in the 1980s still talk about the evenings they spent up there. The floor turned slowly, and the lights of the region passed by the windows.

That chapter ended in 1999. The public areas closed, mainly because they no longer met modern fire safety and evacuation rules. A tower this slender has very limited space for stairways and lifts, and upgrading them is difficult and expensive. Since then, the doors to the top have stayed shut to visitors. Over the years, there have been many discussions and proposals about reopening a viewing level. For now, enjoy the tower from the ground, as everyone else does.

This is the second surprise for many visitors. You can stand right here, but you cannot go up. A Frankfurt guide that sends you to the top would be wrong. The best way to experience the tower is to walk around it. Its proportions shift with every angle. From close by, the shaft fills your view like a cliff. From a few streets away, it suddenly looks slim, almost delicate, against the open sky.

Take a minute with the materials. The shaft is reinforced concrete, poured in sections as the tower climbed. Its surface is plain and unpainted. In soft morning light it looks almost white. Under heavy clouds it turns a cool, flat grey. In the late afternoon it can take on a warm tone. The pod has a more complex form, with layered rings and openings for equipment. Red warning lights mark the structure for aircraft, which matter in a city with a busy international airport.

Turn your back to the tower for a moment and look at the neighbourhood. This is not a business district. You will see apartment blocks, university buildings, tram lines, and plenty of green space. Close by is the Niddapark, a large open park along the small River Nidda. It is a good place to walk, cycle, or sit on the grass. From the open lawns, the tower stands alone above the trees, with no skyscrapers competing for attention.

The tower also works as a compass for the whole city. You can see it from many places across Frankfurt and from the surrounding hills. If you travel downtown later today, look northwest from the riverbank or from a high viewpoint. You will likely find the thin grey line of the asparagus rising on its own, far from the cluster of banking towers. For many residents, that sight means they are almost home.

There is something honest about this structure. It was not built to impress investors or to carry a famous company logo. It was built to send signals. Its form follows that purpose: a tall, stable shaft to lift antennas above the landscape, and a pod to hold equipment. Yet people gave it a playful nickname, filled it with music for twenty years, and still argue about its future. A purely technical object became part of the city's personality.

Before you leave, stand still once more and look up. Follow the shaft from the ground to the pod, then up the antenna to the very tip. Notice how the clouds seem to move behind it, which can make the tower appear to lean. It is not moving. Then lower your eyes to the trees, the paths, and the people walking past without looking up at all. For them, the asparagus is simply part of the sky above Frankfurt.