Cologne Angles for a New Tourist Attraction

The clock tower of the Church of St. John the Baptist, in a dense shopping district in downtown Cologne, aquired a sudden tilt last week.

But instead of an act of God, an act of poor engineering is to blame. Work on a new subway line left the ground beneath the Catholic church hollow, allowing the 40-meter (130-foot) high tower to shift a full meter in one night.

Around 75 people were evacuated from their homes until the church was stabilized a few days later with steel beams and cement.

T-shirts already printed

Someone saw a blessing in the event, but it wasn't a priest.

"If the tower stays crooked for a long time, then maybe we'll offer a special tour around it," said Olaf Pohl, spokesman for the Cologne Tourist Office.

Other tourism officials noted that T-shirts with an image of the tower on it have already gone on sale.

Cologne is used to playing host to church-ogling tourists; its cathedral is one of the overall most-visited sites in Europe. The city on the Rhine is also home to a concentration of 12 Romanesque churches in its downtown alone.

But St. John the Baptist's tower usually fails to show up on visitors' itineraries.The unassuming -- some say unattractive -- red-brick edifice went up just 50 years ago in a postwar rebuilding push.

Now, Pohl noted, "I've seen Japanese tourists taking pictures there."

The city's transit authority is still trying to figure out exactly how to explain the engineering error.