Rhea Boyden on one of Prenzlauer Berg’s most time-resistant streets…
An acquaintance who lives in Mitte, a few meters from an underground station, thinks I am crazy to live on Kopenhagener Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg because it’s so disconnected from public transportation. He does have a point. My street is 800 metres long, Schönhauser Allee is the closest station to my apartment and it is 700 meters away; but it is a fantastic street with a fascinating history.
Kopenhagener Strasse runs parallel to the Ringbahn from Schönhauser Allee to Schwedterstrasse. Though most of the street is comprised of typical turn-of-the-century Mietskaserne housing, several of the buildings were built in Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) style between 1900 and 1910.
The most prominent and impressive building though, is the red-brick Humboldt transformer station that was designed by the industrial architect Hans-Heinrich Müller and was built between 1924 and 1926. It provided Prenzlauer Berg with electricity right up until June 1993.
In 2000, the transformer station became the home of Vitra Design Museum, which moved out after a few months. Various events have been hosted there since, including a Kunstsalon in November 2008, though today it mainly serves as an outpost of Zalando Shoes and Fashion.
The young, international employees often gather for Friday evening drinks across the street at Kohlenquelle Bar, a former coal storage building—usually called “Koppe” by locals—that’s sited on the corner of Sonnenburger Strasse and Kopenhagener Strasse
Kohlenquelle serves reasonably-priced lunches with daily specials that includes their well-established Käsespätzle (Swabian noodles) plus goulash, salads and soups. If you don’t mind the famously “laid back” service, it’s a great spot to enjoy a leisurely meal; and if you’re a history fan, you should check out Juhani Seppovaara’s short documentary all about the building and its fascinating past.
Back in the not-so-recent past, Kohlenquelle also hosted the popular Mittwochsclub in the cellar, a fairly riotous Wednesday night throwdown with an emphasis on electro and global beats. Punters needed a password and the bouncer’s main job was to keep everyone quiet as they came back out, so as not to disturb the neighbours.
Kopenhagener Straße is punctuated with regular playgrounds, partly a product of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. There’s a ‘jungle playground’ where Kopenhagenerstrasse intersects Rhinowerstrasse, and the excellent Moritzhof Children’s Farm lies at the end of the street near Mauerpark, where the wall once divided the French and Soviet sectors. On occasion, I hear the distant bleat of a sheep or crow of a cockerel and completely forget I’m in the middle of a city.
The farm was created after much negotiating with politicians and the Berlin senate, in 1998. By April 2000, the animals had moved in, the same mix of sheep, goats, chickens, geese, ponies, rabbits and guinea pigs that families can find there today (alongside pottery and basket making classes).
Sweet-toothed strollers used to be able to visit the fabulous Sugafari at #69. Its owner, Alexis, a cheerful and sociable man with a full head of blond curls, once told me that his goal is to obtain one sweet from every country in the world. He certainly had a pretty impressive stock with candy from North and South America, Asia, Europe, Africa and New Zealand, but his shop closed down sometime after the pandemic and now houses the hair salon Herr Hasel, which used to be across the street at #14. It’s now quite a trendy place but in its former days there was a piano in the salon and frequent solo performances by local musicians.
Meanwghile at #14 you can find now Wolfgang Gross’s black and white photography studio, previously called Lichtmal. Gross was born in Mitte in 1956 and grew up in Prenzlauer Berg. He has embraced the changes that have taken place in the neighbourhood and does not seem too upset by gentrification. He has been teaching black and white photography in his studio since 2002 and business is still good. In the past many of his customers were younger students, he says, but these days he caters to an older crowd.
Gross is just one of the many creative people who used to live on Kopenhagener Strasse. A 2008 study by the geography department of Berlin’s Humboldt University counted 45 actors, authors and painters living here. The study identified a major protagonist in the street’s creative cluster: Steven Otto, a Canadian investor, who bought three buildings in 2000 and rented the apartments mainly to artists who did not have a steady income. Although those days seem largely gone—along with the bookshop that used to be here—you can still stumble across the occasional gallery or architectural office.
These days there’s a mix of Asian spots close to the Schönhauser Allee end—the Asian Supermarket is a great local resources and there’s also a Bangkok Massage, an Asian-run textile fixer, and a large Hairs and Nails store—and some fancier places such as the new Georgian already mentioned, neighbourhood sensation Estelle, the inevitable hip coffee shops (though the Italian xxxx is my favourite and way friendlier and cosier), and the trendy K,eins, which has been running since 2019 and has a well-curated selection of wine and beer, and pleasant seating inside and out.
A wine shop with more history can be found on the other side of the street at #72: the Kopenhagener Weinhandlung. Opened in 1997 as Nix Wie Wein, it used to be run by a delightful East German woman named Heide Pellmann since 1997 but was taken over in 2015 by Michael d’Aprile and former Nix Wie Wein employee Erika, so continuing Pellmann’s legacy. Nowadays the selection runs the gamut from traditional European and New World wines to low-intervention and natural types.
The laid-back atmosphere of the street makes it fairly easy to come into contact with the locals. Many of the mothers organize informal flea markets and clothes exchanges right on the street in the summer. The local bike shop Wulf (#xx) is a meeting point, and there are also frequent street barbecues and parties where the neighbours come out and share food and drink and get to know each other. Some residents near the Ystader Strasse corner of Kopenhagener Strasse take full advantage of the wide footpaths to cultivate gardens in various vessels, including zucchini, corn, tomatoes, herbs, sunflowers and many other flowers.
Since the fall of the Wall, nearly every building on Kopenhagener Strasse has been renovated, but two elements of the street help retain a nostalgic aura: the shiny cobblestones and the fact it’s not a main thoroughfare. For this reason it has been a much-used set for several ‘Ostalgie’ films over the years; parts of ‘Sommer Vorm Balkon’, ‘Der Rote Kakadu, ‘Das Leben ist eine Baustelle’ and several others were filmed here. At #41 you can even find a rare Goldener Hausnummer—these were given out during the GDR era to houses that were particularly well looked after as a way to incentivise reparations and orderliness. You were also no doubt noted down in the Stasi’s books if you somehow didn’t get one.
A few years ago I came home from work to discover that the Berlin Wall had actually been re-built on my street; I was only allowed past the ‘checkpoint’ after assuring the film crew that I lived there. And film crews have even overtaken my house before too: though it has been since renovated, two years ago it was still in its post-war/pre-wall state—i.e. run-down and riddled with bullet holes—and the hallway also attracted the film crews.
You can also find some unrefurbished interiors from the war era if you’re lucky enough to find an open front door to let you glimpse properly inside. None are as glaringly obvious as the building that contains and connects to Kopenquelle, though, which has become something of an Istagrammer destination since it’s run-down on the exterior as well as outside. There are plans to rebuild to neighbouring bridge though, which rauses concerns about how long this spot will stay in its attractively ruinous state.
Although the commercial half of the street more or less stops at Ysterstrasse, it’s worth continuing along to reach Schwedterstrasse where the wall used to run. As well as the already-mentioned kinder