Paul Sullivan discovers there’s more to Berlin’s loveliest inner-city bay than meets the eye…
The soaring, cock-shaped Art Nouveau water-tower at S-Bahn Ostkreuz might be adorably photogenic, but it’s not the only reason to make a journey to the station. This historic—and historically busy—station is of course a major urban interchange, but it’s also the most convenient public transport stop for the Rummelsburger Bucht, one of the city’s most pleasant waterside areas.
In fact, the station’s former name, Stralau-Rummelsburg—it was renamed Ostkreuz in 1933—is a direct allusion to the bay, which today is still hugged by the Alt-Stralau peninsula to the west, and the Lichtenberger Rummelsburger Ufer to the east, and which has been undergoing some quite intense redevelopment in recent decades. Even now, two decades after the Wasserstadt Stralau project began building new homes on the peninsula, cranes and bulldozers are still rumbling and digging up mounds of earth along Kynaststrasse, which runs directly along the head of the bay.
Could this perhaps be some of the social housing the city so desperately needs? No chance. On the Rummelsburger Ufer side—right where a camp of 100 or so homeless people was unceremoniously cleared on a freezing February day earlier this year—the bay will get an 11,000 square-meter, seven-floor commercial office block called AXIS. Not just any old office block, mind you, but, according to the project website, a place to achieve an ideal “work-lake balance” (yes, they actually wrote that), where “inspiration, work and leisure merge” and whose architecture will “respond to the significant urban location with striking objectivity”. Which is strange, because the mock-up looks pretty much like every other office building in the city: extraordinary only in its unimaginative blandness.
AXIS, though, is fairly modest compared to the neighbouring project, which will take up a whopping 300-meters along the rest of the street. Named B-HUB, this 46,500 square-meter, eleven-storey-tall behemoth promises to be not just a “spectacular office building”, but a “refreshing” place for “exchange and retreat—a “hipster start-up hub” so “dynamic” and “innovative” that its own illustrative video comes with a ‘CEO-techno’ soundtrack, and visions of what seem to be exclusively white, mostly corporate-attired employees mingling and working deep into the night to admire the wonderful sundowner views from their upper offices and roof terrace. Excitingly, it will also contain a supermarket.
What isn’t mentioned so clearly on the billboards or the websites is that the building will also serve as a buffer against all the noise emanating from the adjacent S Bahn and the proposed A100 motorway, which has created major regular protests throughout the city. And that’s not all: if the developers get their way, there will also be a giant Coral World—which seems about as necessary for the city as another pop-up burger outlet—although this has been contested by residents and concerned citizens under the Bay For All campaign (you can sign the petition and donate here).
No surprises that the area’s largely well-off residents have also worked together with local officials and business investors to clear the former floating ‘pirate’ (anarchist) communities from the bay’s waters, namely Alt-Lummerland (which burned down in 2017) and its successor, Neu-Lummerland. And yet this long-standing corporate onslaught still hasn’t destroyed the many pleasant charms that the bay area offers; in fact—as is often the case when investors seek to reassure and placate local communities—it has actively contributed some public infrastructure.
These days visitors can not only find lovely riverside vistas, but also beer gardens and restaurants, places to rent boats and kayaks, cycling paths, playgrounds, and green lawns, and a popular climbing wall. Non-residents are also still welcome to squeeze themselves into the myriad riverbank nooks to drink a beer and enjoy the scenery. And, this being Berlin, there’s lots of history to be found too, including former palm oil and bottling factories that hark back to the area’s mostly forgotten 19th century industrial legacy, an orphanage for boys and girls, and a labour camp that morphed into a 20th-century prison and is now a memorial to its Nazi and GDR victims.
