The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape

by Brian Ladd

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Friedrichstadt gradually changed from middle-class residential neighborhood to bustling commercial quarter. Entrepreneurs tore down the modest old houses and replaced them with ornate, five-story buildings. These new structures had the same dimensions as the new apartment buildings elsewhere in the city, but here they housed mainly offices and shops. The northern Friedrichstadt became the banking center of Germany; the southern part was the newspaper district; fashionable stores settled in between, along Leipziger Strasse. Like the new apartment houses, these buildings were usually built as tall as was permitted. The maximum height depended on the street width but could never exceed seventy-two feet. This is the height limit applied to the cornices of new buildings in the “critically reconstructed” Friedrichstadt.