Hamburg's Stadtpark: A Park Built to Be Used

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When I moved to Hamburg in 2018, I bought a bike in my first week. After that, almost every day after work, I was just jumping on it and cycling around the city without any direction. That is how I discovered places like Niendorfer Gehege, Haynspark and the Stadtpark.<br>The first time I ended up in the Stadtpark, the thing that struck me was the amount of trees. I was cycling through the city and suddenly I found myself in a wood. Then came the Planetarium with its red bricks, and the huge lawn in front of it, and I was amazed by the size of the whole park.<br>Every big city has its own city park. Central Park in New York, Hyde Park in London, the Englischer Garten in Munich, the Tiergarten in Berlin. Those are the ones that come to mind. The Stadtpark is smaller than all of them and almost nobody outside Hamburg knows about it. But it was planned from the start around what people would do in it, rather than only around how it would look, and more than a hundred years later it still works that way. After living next to it for years, I think that matters more than any ranking by hectares.<br>The park is not really that far from the city centre. So a lot of people live close enough to just walk in. A year later, when I needed to move out of my loud neighbourhood, the park had a big impact on my decision about where to go. And living there also showed me that the park was not just a huge lawn and a Planetarium. It is a giant complex for recreational activities.<br>The lawn<br>The Stadtpark opened in 1914 and was designed by Fritz Schumacher, with the main purpose of active use instead of quiet strolling. It was built on 149 hectares, close to the districts where the working class was crowded in. Small flats, not much free time. The park was supposed to be the place they actually did things.<br>The numbers also show it worked. On a sunny weekend more than 200.000 people come to the park, which is around 10 percent of the whole city.<br>That intention is still there when you look at the lawn. It is a huge open space that gives people room to do whatever they want. A couple of sections of it are marked as grill areas, with special bins for the used coals.<br>If you visit this area on a sunny weekend, you see how diverse this space is. And when I say diverse, I do not only mean the activities. It is also the people. Sometimes I joke with my friends that there are so many nationalities on this lawn that it looks like the United Nations assembly. In most cases a group takes some space on the lawn, bringing their own mat and their own food. Some have already started grilling while the others are playing games. There were games I saw for the first time in this park, like Spikeball, Flunkyball, Boule and Kubb.<br>On the parts of the lawn where grilling is not allowed, I also see people playing cricket sometimes, or a group doing fitness or yoga together. Sometimes I see people practising music, playing their guitar or saxophone.<br>The lake<br>The lawn ends at the artificial lake, the Stadtparksee. Many people swim there, or go canoeing or stand up paddling. Others just sunbathe next to it.<br>One afternoon I was sitting there with some friends and I watched a woman cycle up to the water. She changed into her swimming things right where she stood, quickly and without any fuss, left her clothes and her bike on the grass, and swam for about half an hour. Then she came out, dried herself, put her clothes back on and cycled off.<br>What stayed with me was not the swimming. It was that none of it looked planned. She was not spending her afternoon at the lake, she was just going through her day, and the lake happened to be part of it.<br>At least two places rent out canoes and paddle boards, but I also see many people bringing their own inflatable board, pumping the air on the side, and starting their journey from there and going through the Goldbekkanal.<br>This is the part that surprised me most when I started reading about other city parks. A lake in the middle of a big city that you can simply get into is not a normal thing.<br>The lake also hosts many animals like ducks and swans. Close to it you find the Rosengarten, with different kinds of flowers in different colours. Around this area people dance salsa from time to time, and other dances that I have never managed to identify.<br>The sports facilities<br>When you look at the park, it is so easy to miss the rest of it. The lawn, the lake and the woods around them take all your attention, and you might think that is what the park offers. But if you walk out to the sides, you find many sports facilities.

The west side, close to the Planetarium, has an athletics facility with a running track. Right next to it comes an area for beach volleyball and a place to train calisthenics, which I use myself from time to time with a friend. North of this the Hamburg Hurricanes train on two football fields.<br>I had never heard of the Hurricanes until I saw them in the...