History
At the beginning of the 17th century it developed as a suburb called 'Hamburger Berg' (Hamburg mountain) outside the gates of the nearby city of Hamburg and close to the city of Altona. The name comes from a hill in that area that was planed by Hamburg in 1620 for defence reasons (free field of fire for the artillery). Therefore, settlement was initially allowed there, but soon businesses, which were not desired inside Hamburg, e.g. for their smell or noise, were relegated to 'Hamburger Berg'. Also the rope makers (or 'Reeper' in Low German) went here because in the city it was hard to find enough space for their work. The name of St. Pauli's most famous street Reeperbahn, or "Rope Walk," harkens back to its rope making past. When people were officially allowed to live in St. Pauli at the end of the 17th century the city government moved workhouses and (pestilence) hospitals out of the city to 'Hamburger Berg,' which later was named after its church, 'St. Pauli' (Saint Paul).
There have been various social fights during the last decades (examples are Hafenstraße, Rote Flora and Bambule).
Read more about this topic: St. Pauli
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)