Antique & Vintage Postcards

A hand-colored street scene bustling with Edwardian-era pedestrians captures the iconic Eschenheimer Turm rising dramatically above Frankfurt's busy Eschenheimer Anlage — one of the finest surviving medieval gate towers in Germany, built between 1400 and 1428, its slender Gothic turrets piercing a soft blue sky. Tram tracks glisten in the foreground as fashionably dressed figures in dark overcoats and long skirts go about their daily business, while a red-brick commercial building anchors the right side of the composition, its ground-floor shops hinting at the commercial energy of Wilhelmine-era Frankfurt. The tower's storied history includes its role as a prison for the knight Götz von Berlichingen, and postcards of this beloved landmark were perennial sellers in the years before the First World War.