George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund
History
George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers
Street, George Edmund
Architecture, Gothic; Church architecture -- Europe; Europe -- Description and travel; Street, George Edmund, 1824-1881
The plan of the city is simple enough. One great street runs the whole
length of the peninsula on which it stands, from north to south,
finished by the Burg-Thor, a fine old gateway, on the north, and by
the cathedral and its close to the south. Right and left of this main
street are a multitude of streets descending to the water which almost
surrounds the whole town, and on the other side of the water are
immense earth-works, rising really into respectable hills, and said to
be the largest earth-works known; happily these great mounds--no longer
useful for purposes of defence--are eminently so for ornament, and
planted with great trees and laid out with walks and gardens form one
of the most pleasant features of the place; on the outer side of those
earth-works another line of water gives one certainly a very watery
impression of the whole city.
The main features of interest to an architect are in the principal
street. Beginning at the extreme south is the cathedral with its two
towers and spires standing alone and forlorn in the most deserted
part of the town, and even in the busiest days of Lübeck scarcely so
near to the bulk of the people as a cathedral should ever be; then on
either side we pass the churches of S. Giles and S. Peter, and going
along under the walls of the picturesque old Rathhaus find ourselves
close to the east end of the Marien-Kirche--a cathedral in dignity of
proportions and outline, and here superior to the cathedral in its
central position and in its greater height and general magnificence;
next, the Katerinen-Kirche is left a few steps to the right, then S.
James’s is passed, another tall spire, and then the west front of the
very interesting Heiligen Geist Hospital; and a hundred yards further
on we are in front of the relics of the Burg-Kloster, and close to
this find ourselves at the Burg-Thor, a picturesque gateway second
only in effect to the Holsteiner gate which I have before mentioned as
terminating one of the cross streets which lead to the railway. The
Burg-Thor stands just at the neck of the peninsula, and beyond it is
the Burg-Feld, a wood intersected with paths, and looking rather like
the Thier-Garten outside the Brandenburg gate at Berlin.
And now to describe the architectural beauties of the town we must go
back to the cathedral, and as in duty bound begin with what is at once
the oldest and the chief in rank of the ecclesiastical buildings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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