Hacker News Reader

Comment by coroxout | Hacker News Reader

Impressive how many of the buildings are still there and recognisable. Nice to see most of the 30+ year old apartment blocks still standing and well looked after.

Must have been so weird to look out from a high-up apartment on one side of the wall all the way over no-man's-land towards the windows of another block on the other side.

View on HN

> Impressive how many of the buildings are still there and recognisable. Nice to see most of the 30+ year old apartment blocks still standing and well looked after.

Have you seen many cities where buildings that are merely 30 years old do not exist anymore ?

The situation with older buildings in central Berlin is quite interesting though, because so many quite grand buildings on the eastern side went untouched for 50 years after the war. Then in the late 90s large areas of east-central Berlin were restored at some speed, from bullet-holed crumbling blackened stone to smart painted render in what I assume was something like the original style.

I once wrote a rather personal ramble that touches on this, here https://thebreakfastpost.com/2014/09/23/alte-schonhauser-str... with some pictures taken in 1993 of the area around Hackescher Markt. If you click through on one of the photos, there are a few more on the Flickr set that don't appear in the article.

Thanks for sharing those photos. It's crazy how long Tacheles was in ruins. I was just there in January and there's actually construction breaking ground.

When's the last time you were back in Berlin? Have you seen how Neue Schönhauser Str. has developed?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com