Archaeologists have unearthed Berlin’s oldest street, and it is actually pretty cool. Even though it was likely built in the 13th century, the wooden planks look surprisingly fresh.
From the 1860s through the Second World War, Berlin was notoriously crowded, with many of its working-class residents packed into suffocating Mietskasernen (“Rental Barracks”).
On November 14, 1990, approximately 3000 police from across Germany forcibly evicted several hundred mostly young squatters from 13 buildings along Mainzer Straße, in the eastern district of Friedrichshain.
It was one of the largest street battles in Berlin since the (failed) revolution of 1953, and had repercussions that continue to be felt.
If, like me, you’ve spent a lot of time traveling Berlin’s S-Bahn ring, you might have noticed the large empty space directly to the east of the Frankfurter Allee S-Bahn station. It looks like any number of former industrial sites in the city: run-down, abandoned, with a few remnants here and there.
I was surprised to learn that this particular space wasn’t just a random factory: it was a so-called “Containerbahnhof,” where shipping containers could be on- and off-loaded to and from railcars.
Berlin has committed itself to building 100 kilometers of express bike lanes (Radschnellverbindungen) in the next 5 years or so. I made a deep-dive into one section of that network: the route from the Tiergarten to Alexanderplatz and beyond. What I found is very exciting, but construction is still a long way off.
One of the more dominant features of Berlin’s central skyline is a row of apartment towers running along the southern side of Leipziger Straße. The apartment towers, along with buildings running on the northern side of the street, were built as an ensemble by the DDR between 1969 and 1982 and are referred to as the Leipziger Straße Complex.
The Berliner Verbindungsbahn (the Berlin Connector Train) was built to connect 5 large train stations around the city. These train stations were built as so-called Kopfbahnhöfe, or Terminus Stations, meaning that trains rode in and out on the same track, and didn’t come in one end and out the other. This meant that it was super difficult to get from one train station to the other. The Berliner Verbindungsbahn was a street-level rail system that connected each of the 5 main stations. It was taken out of service with the completion of the Berliner Ringbahn, which is still in service today.
The Berliner Schloss (Berlin Palace) is a showpiece building at the center of Berlin. It was a Prussian royal residence for hundreds of years before being transformed for a few decades into the imperial residence during the German Empire. Erased from the map for 30 years after the Second World War, the Palace was the site of a DDR monolith in the 1970s and 1980s. The Berliner Schloss is enjoying yet another rebirth, this time as a museum honoring Berlin’s many connections to the world outside of Germany and Europe.
Rigaer Straße 94 has been squatted since 1990. Back then, it was one of dozens of similar squats throughout Berlin, and one of many in and around Rigaer Straße itself. Over the years, most of Berlin’s squats have been either legalized through rental contracts, or the residents have been forcibly removed.
On the surface, Berlin Alexanderplatz is about a down-on-his-luck Berliner named Franz Biberkopf. But really, the book is about Berlin itself, and the working class milieu to which Biberkopf belongs. When the novel opens, it’s some time in the 1920s and Franz has just been released from prison for killing his girlfriend.
Berlin has a lot of Markthallen - Market Halls. Like many other substantial changes to Berlin’s urban infrastructure (including the Central Slaughterhouse in the last third of the 19th century, the construction of market halls was undertaken to address the needs of a quickly growing city. Quite simply, there weren’t enough indoor, hygienic places for people to buy groceries and other food supplies.
