Joanna Greaves walks along Prenzlauer Allee and uncovers its multi-layered past…

It’s almost impossible to imagine that just 200 years ago, the area we now know as Prenzlauer Berg was open fields punctuated by the windmills that earned it the name of Windmühlenberg, or Windmill Hill. With the rapid urbanisation of the mid-1800s came mass worker housing in the form of five- and six-storey tenements with their characteristic Hinterhöfe, as well as schools, hospitals and churches.

Although Prenzlauer Berg wasn’t deemed important enough to be included in the 1920 Baedeker Guide to Berlin, it nonetheless played a major role in the city’s industrial and cultural expansion, particularly in relation to the burgeoning brewery scene that developed throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the tenements had grown into overcrowded slums lacking adequate sanitation; a far cry from the orderly, pristine edifices that line the district’s streets nowadays. A large number of these houses escaped World War Two relatively intact, though the GDR left the area to its own devices for several decades, providing the conditions for a fertile counter-cultural scene in the 70s and 80s that has, post-Wende, all but disappeared.

My first home in Berlin was close to S-Bahn Prenzlauer Allee, one of the few un-gentrified parts of Prenzlauer Berg on the district’s northern periphery. A constant flurry of activity, with streams of people moving between the quaint yellow-brick station, and the nearby bus and tram stops, it was—and remains—a place of transit rather than a destination.

Every few minutes an M2 tram would sweep up and down Prenzlauer Allee, travelling south towards bustling Alexanderplatz or north towards the quiet residential district of Heinersdorf. I took these trams often, regarding the large, traffic-heavy boulevard as most do: as a busy, largely unremarkable thoroughfare useful for getting from A to B.

But during those tram—and occasional bicycle—trips I began to notice enough architectural and historical curiosities to warrant exploring the street on foot and pay closer attention to the role the street has played in Prenzlauer Berg’s development.

The three-kilometre avenue bisects the entire district from Torstrasse in the south to Ostseestrasse farther north, and was originally built as a rural highway to the northern city of Prenzlau. The Torstrasse terminus was the original site of the Prenzlauer Tor, one of 18 gates in the former city customs wall, both of which were demolished to facilitate the mid-19th-century expansion of the city whenÂ…