Task #24: Student Residence Hall

Find the place in Heidelberg where these two buildings sit next to each other. The one on the right was named after Gustav Radbruch (1878-1949), a German politician and law professor who was one of the first to be fired by the Nazis when they came to power, and one of the first to be reinstated after the Second World War. The building on the left was once the Hotel Goldenes Ross, but it was bought in the 1920s for use as a student residence hall with money donated by an American named Hiram Watson Sibley (1845-1932), who is perhaps best known as the founder of the Sibley Music Library at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Sibley was extremely rich because his father, Hiram Sibley (1807-1888), had made a huge fortune in the 1850s and '60s by consolidating a group of small telegraph companies to form the Western Union Telegraph Company. Take a picture of yourself from this same angle here. If you've got a bike, be sitting on it.

What can I say about this place that Marhs hasn't already? Maybe a word about the bikes. Heidelberg is a bike city. I don't know if I've ever said anything about that, but there are lanes galore for bikes, lights for bikes, bells for bikes, bike laws, and the best way to get around is, surprise surprise, a bike. No matter what the weather, people are on the bikes. I don't know how they do it, though, because I just can't brave it in the cold--which is why I'm not sitting on my bike in the photo above (that and the rain). Most of the old city is a pedestrian zone so how else are you going to going to run a quick errand?