You Are Here: 138 years and 65 metres away from Checkpoint Charlie
Unlike many other large urban centres, Berlin is not a difficult city to navigate. Despite its size, you can get from A to B pretty easily just by following in the right direction - it might take you a while, that much is true (as anyone who ever walked from Steglitz to Wedding will tell you), yet Berlin is not a city where you could get really and hopelessly lost.
Historic photographs are a completely different kettle of fish. Finding your way through vanished and resurrected streets, through plazas that no longer exist, through parks and hills where none used to be requires a good eye for details, some knowledge of the city’s past and a good handful of historic maps. Well-functioning gut feeling is quite priceless, too.
In this little series “You Are Here” I will be introducing some wonderful photos of that gone Berlin and help to locate them for you. And where better to start than in Friedrichstraße and who, better to begin with than the one and only Friedrich Albert Schwartz? Without whom we would not know half of the things about Berlin before its many refurbishments and whose works are now part of the vast collection of Berlin’s Stadtmuseum (City Museum).
House on the corner of Friedrichstraße and Mauerstraße - now only some 65 metres north or Checkpoint Charlie - was photographed by F.A. Schwartz in 1888. In the background a tiny bit of the now long vanished Bethlehemskirche peeks out on the right side of Mauerstraße. Deeper in the hazy background brand new building of Kaiserliche Reichpostamt, main seat of imperial post, would be erected some 10 years later. It is home to world’s first postal services museum - now Museum für Kommunikation.
The building, which doesn’t exist any more (as don’t the buildings to its left or the one behind it in Schützenstraße 1) had a typical bevelled corner with a large shop window of the corset manufacturer who occupied the ground floor at the time.
Such bevelled corners are, by the way, known as Berliner Ecke (Berlin corner).
Thank you for reading Berlin Companion. As always, please do comment, follow and share!
Thank you. I tried several times, and it's very hard to find what is what and fro where the photogeph was made.
Thanks! Without the parking cars there was enough space for the snow from the pedestrian ways...