Re-discovered Rubble

Recently the weather has been getting much warmer and one of these days I rode my bike around to run some errands and go to the studio. First, I headed up to Wedding district to got to the OBI Baumarkt to look for building materials. They did not have what I was looking for and I never would have expected that German hardware would be so different than American hardware. The variety of screws are different, sheetrock comes in different sizes and forms, and there is a whole range of garden tools that I have never seen before. After leaving I was slightly distracted by the sunshine and decided to ride my bike around these neighborhoods I had never visited.

I ended up crossing from former East Berlin into West Berlin and from West back into the East again. Unknowingly following the path of the wall I was attracted to these wide swaths of undeveloped land and how they have been repurposed, as a beach volleyball center, new loft housing developments, future parks, a Berlin Wall memorial. Yet they currently exist as these great points of rest, of calm and of history in a rapidly changing city. Near one of these empty lot fields, I found a rare specimen of something I have only heard about. One of the many abandoned buildings that populated the city during its division and since the wall came down. I have heard it described that when the wall came down people flooded out of east Berlin leaving behind fully furnished apartments. Later, people began to repopulate these apartments using them for housing or turning them into underground clubs and bars.

There are very few of these sites left in the center of the city, but here are pictures from the one i explored that day near Nord Bahnhof.