Name that Street! Two Shop Signs to One Street in Frankfurt

Title: Name that street! (Bellingcat Challenge, Urban Exploration series, by Kolina)

Description: There are plenty of areas to walk in cities around the world, and this street is one of them. But where is it?

Question: What is the name of this street?

The answer, up front: the photo was taken on Stiftstraße in central Frankfurt am Main, looking north-west along it. Two shop signs in the photo, a fabric shop and a mattress store, each have exactly one branch in the region the number plates point to, and both branches are on that street.

Stiftstraße

The whole brief. No street sign, no house numbers, nothing that names the city.

What the photo gives you: German number plates, a few shop signs at street level, election posters on a lamp post, and the architecture. What it doesn’t give you is any text with a place name. One more thing about the file itself, which I only checked afterwards: it still carries its EXIF data, GPS included. More on that under Verification. The route below doesn’t use it.

Step 1: The number plates, Rhine-Main

Observation. Five cars have readable plates. The district codes are WI, HG, GG, WI and OF.

Four districts, all around Frankfurt. Wiesbaden, Bad Homburg (Hochtaunuskreis), Groß-Gerau and Offenbach.

Inference. German plates start with the code of the district where the car is registered. All four codes here belong to the Rhine-Main area in southern Hesse, and they ring Frankfurt: Wiesbaden to the west, Bad Homburg to the north, Groß-Gerau to the south-west, Offenbach to the east.

How sure? A parked car only says where its owner is registered, not where it is parked. One plate is a hint; five from neighbouring districts on one street make the region solid. It doesn’t pick a city, though. There isn’t a single F plate, and a street full of commuters in Frankfurt would look exactly like this.

Step 2: The shop signs

Three things at street level can be read with some zooming:

Left: a fabric shop, JP Stoffe. Middle: an FDP poster with Christian Lindner’s face over an SPD poster. Right: SAMINA, in green.

The posters are context, the two signs are leads. A chain with many branches wouldn’t help much, but neither of these is one.

Step 3: JP Stoffe has three shops

Action. The shop’s website, jpstoffe.de, lists its locations in the footer:

Three shops, all in the Rhine-Main area: Mörfelden, Mainz-Kastel and Frankfurt.

All three sit inside the circle the plates draw, so the plates can’t choose between them. Mainz-Kastel has a Mainz postcode, but it is a district of Wiesbaden, so it’s in Hesse too.

How sure? The list is the website in 2026. The photo could be older, and shops move. Before relying on today’s addresses, it’s worth knowing when the photo was taken.

Step 4: The poster dates the photo to 2023

Observation. The yellow poster is an FDP design with Christian Lindner’s portrait and a headline that starts “…ndner kommt!”. The red one under it is SPD (“Gute Bildung von Anfang an”).

Action. A Google image search for

linder kommt plakate

(the typo didn’t hurt) finds an Alamy stock photo of the same poster:

Same design, same portrait. Alamy dates the photo 29 September 2023: “Wahlplakat Landtagswahl 08.10.2023”.

Inference. The poster advertises a Lindner appearance on 5 October 2023 at the Palmengarten in Frankfurt, with Bettina Stark-Watzinger and Stefan Naas, the FDP’s lead candidate in Hesse. It’s campaign material for the Hessian state election on 8 October 2023. Posters like that are up for a few weeks before polling day, so the photo is from September or early October 2023.

How sure? The poster in the challenge photo is too small to read the event line, so the match rests on the layout and the portrait. That’s enough for the year, and it fits the plates: a Hessian election poster on a street full of Hessian cars. It also says the photo is about three years old, so today’s store lists need a second, independent check. Bavaria voted on the same day, but nothing else in the photo points there.

Step 5: SAMINA has one branch in the region

Action. SAMINA is a mattress and bed brand with its own stores. The store finder lists them by country:

Eighteen stores in Germany. In the Rhine-Main area there is only one: Frankfurt.

There’s no store in Wiesbaden, Mainz or Mörfelden. That rules out two of the three JP Stoffe branches. And the Frankfurt store page gives its address:

SAMINA at Stiftstraße 14, JP Stoffe at Stiftstraße 22. Two unrelated businesses, the same street.

That’s where it’s decided. Each sign on its own leaves a choice. Together they leave one street, and the house numbers (14 and 22, a few doors apart) fit the photo, where the two shopfronts are a short way apart on the same side of the street.

Step 6: Street View

Action. Google Maps, Stiftstraße, Street View near number 26, looking north-west up the street. The March 2022 pass matches:

Top: the challenge, 30 September 2023. Bottom: Street View, March 2022. Same lamp, same domed corner building, same hoarding, same roofline.

What lines up:

• The double street lamp in front of the beige office block on the left.
• The domed corner building on the right, with its rounded tower and dormers.
• The small ornamental tower on a roof at the far end of the street.
• The wooden hoarding along the right-hand pavement. In 2022 it’s newer and carries different graffiti (ERINNERN), but it’s the same fence around the same building site.
• The shopfronts further down on the left, where the JP Stoffe and SAMINA signs are in the challenge photo.

The trees are bare in March 2022 and in full leaf in the challenge photo, which fits a late-September date.

Verification

1. Two independent businesses. JP Stoffe and SAMINA have nothing to do with each other, and their websites give addresses on the same street. Neither list was used to find the other.
2. Street View. The fixed features of the street (the lamp, the domed building, the roofline, the hoarding) match from the same viewpoint, eighteen months apart.
3. The file’s EXIF data. The challenge image as served by Bellingcat (street.jpg) was never stripped:

$ exiftool -GPSPosition -DateTimeOriginal -GPSImgDirection -Model street.jpg
GPS Position                    : 50 deg 6' 58.25" N, 8 deg 40' 54.55" E
Date/Time Original              : 2023:09:30 18:13:18
GPS Img Direction               : 332
Camera Model Name               : Pixel 6 Pro

50.1162° N, 8.6818° E reverse-geocodes via Nominatim to Stiftstraße, Innenstadt, Frankfurt am Main. The camera faced 332° (magnetic), which is the axis of the street: OpenStreetMap has Stiftstraße running south-east to north-west at about the same bearing. The timestamp is 30 September 2023, one day after Alamy’s photo of the same poster, and eight days before the election. The visual route got both the street and the date right without it.

The moment of certainty is the pair of addresses. Two businesses that share nothing but a street, a few doors apart on the same side, as they are in the photo. One shop sign is a candidate list; two that intersect in one entry are an answer.

The alternatives, excluded. JP Stoffe’s other two shops are Bölckestraße in Mainz-Kastel and Siemensstraße in Mörfelden. Neither town has a SAMINA store, so neither street can have both signs. Frankfurt is the only place on both lists.

Answer

Stiftstraße

Frankfurt am Main, Innenstadt, camera position about 50.1162° N, 8.6818° E (from EXIF, consistent with Street View).

Takeaways

• Check the file before you look at the picture. exiftool takes a second. Here it would have solved the challenge outright. Solving it by eye is still the better exercise, but knowing the answer is in the metadata changes how much time you spend.
• Number plates give you a region, not a city. Commuters park where they work. Read several and look at where they cluster.
• Small chains are better than big ones. A shop with three branches is a short list. Two short lists that share one entry are an answer.
• Date the photo before you trust today’s directories. Election posters are about the best dating evidence a street can give you: they’re tied to a polling day and come down soon after.
• Match on what doesn’t change. Street View was eighteen months older than the photo. Trees, graffiti and parked cars differ; lamps, rooflines and corner buildings don’t.

Sources

• Bellingcat Challenge 11: Name that street!
• Challenge image, original file, EXIF intact
• JP Stoffe, branch addresses in the footer
• SAMINA store finder and SAMINA Frankfurt, Stiftstraße 14
• Google image search linder kommt plakate, Alamy photo of the FDP poster dated 29.09.2023
• Google Maps Street View, Stiftstraße 26, March 2022
• Nominatim reverse geocoding for the EXIF coordinates