Berlin's worst district
Jun. 5th, 2006 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI'm flathunting. I'm flathunting in Berlin. And I'm flathunting at a time when, thanks to my Wired column, I have a regular income for once, and can afford something really quite nice, especially in a city where rents are on average one third what they'd be in London or New York. I could be flathunting in one of Berlin's four trendy districts -- Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain or Kreuzberg. Instead, I'm flathunting in Neukölln.
Neukölln, by most accounts, is Berlin's worst district, an area with "problem schools" where teachers walk in fear of assault and students are passed through metal detectors every morning. Reports on the area stress that "Neukölln is not South Central LA. But..." (They always add the but.) Wiki-Travel says: "Neukölln was and likely always will be an under-class working borough with a big migration scene. Neukölln offers big contrasts between the poor northern part of Neukölln and the more village-looking south parts..."
On my first visit to Berlin, back in 1987 (I was touring with Primal Scream), I took the U-bahn to Neukölln to check out what had inspired David Bowie to write the fractured, angsty track on the instrumental side of "Heroes" -- his sax seems to splinter like a breaking mirror. What I discovered -- that misty evening back in the time when Berlin was still segmented, walled, and cordoned -- was the villagey-looking southern part. The place I'm now targeting for my new home is the high-density Turkish quarter in the northern part of the district. (By the way, it turns out that Bowie just wanted to pay tribute to the band Neu! The track had little to do with Neukölln itself.)
So why am I focusing my housing hunt on "Berlin's worst district"? I'll need to give you a multi-part answer:
a) As in all "bad" districts, the rents are pretty low. You get lots of space for your euro, and I have a shipment of boxes arriving soon from New York, all the books and records that have been sitting there in storage since I lived on Orchard Street.
b) I want to be near my favourite Berlin food market, the Turkish Maybuchufer market that operates, two days a week, alongside the Landwehrkanal. (This market was the site of my Fashion Muslim action last September.)
c) Districts like Prenzlauer Berg are full of yuppyish shops selling twee jewelry, expensive coffee, exotic chocolate and so on. They're full of middle class people and their children. Laidback, slow-paced, yet often uptight. (How can you be laidback yet uptight? The Germans manage it.)
d) Friedrichshain gets more and more like the Lower East Side; invaded at weekends by obnoxious people who bar-hop, ear-marked by developers who turn charmingly fusty buildings (like the big corner block on Kopernicus Strasse and Simon-Dach Strasse) into horrible "luxury apartment" complexes. The dirt and patina are being squeezed out. Money ruins everything.
e) I prefer Turkish-German culture to German-German culture. Turks, being Muslims, don't drink. They also don't rock, an important consideration! Their food is better than German food, they dress better than the Germans dress, and they embrace the sort of high-vitality, high-density lifestyles I prefer: Asian-style living.
f) Perhaps this is the most important thing, but it's the least definable: there's just some sort of magic in the corner of Neukölln where it meets Kreuzberg at the canal. It's got leafy cobbled streets, charming old buildings with atmospheric lobbies, lots of mature trees, grubby high-density bargain shopping (the kind I like) on the main streets, a subway line (the U8), water and fresh vegetables, immigrant exoticism. Yes, I refuse to condemn the exoticization of immigrants. Seeing immigrant quarters as "Romantic" or "exotic" is a valid counter-balance to seeing them as "problematical" or "undesireable".
g) I can sense that this area (eight or ten blocks) is on the cusp of something. In other words, there's a chance that this part of Neukölln (like Wedding, the other poor area currently being infiltrated by artists) will increasingly be a destination for creative people. There are already two or three art galleries on Bürknerstrasse. They're the kind of places which seem to be run entirely for the benefit of the owners, who sit outside on chairs, recognizing but ignoring others of their type and race. It's pretty much just Turks and creatives here at the moment, no yuppie babies, little dogs (with their little blobs of little dog shit), Thai restaurants or luxury apartment developments.
It's probably this "on the cusp" thing that I'm mostly responding to in this part of Neukölln. I really enjoy that feeling of being part of the birth of an area's hipness, that time when people open eccentric, short-lived businesses: funny cafes with shabby chairs and hardly anything to eat or drink, frequented by oddly-dressed people. Secret cinema clubs. That fragile period (it might last three, four years) before the real cafes and cinemas move in, and everything becomes marketed, slick, targeted, sewn-up.
Of course, even writing this "Neukölln-hype" I'm hastening the day these ten or so blocks at the north end of Neukölln become as trampled and herded as Bedford Avenue or Ludlow Street. But that day is still far off for "Berlin's worst district".
Neukölln, by most accounts, is Berlin's worst district, an area with "problem schools" where teachers walk in fear of assault and students are passed through metal detectors every morning. Reports on the area stress that "Neukölln is not South Central LA. But..." (They always add the but.) Wiki-Travel says: "Neukölln was and likely always will be an under-class working borough with a big migration scene. Neukölln offers big contrasts between the poor northern part of Neukölln and the more village-looking south parts..."
On my first visit to Berlin, back in 1987 (I was touring with Primal Scream), I took the U-bahn to Neukölln to check out what had inspired David Bowie to write the fractured, angsty track on the instrumental side of "Heroes" -- his sax seems to splinter like a breaking mirror. What I discovered -- that misty evening back in the time when Berlin was still segmented, walled, and cordoned -- was the villagey-looking southern part. The place I'm now targeting for my new home is the high-density Turkish quarter in the northern part of the district. (By the way, it turns out that Bowie just wanted to pay tribute to the band Neu! The track had little to do with Neukölln itself.)
So why am I focusing my housing hunt on "Berlin's worst district"? I'll need to give you a multi-part answer:
a) As in all "bad" districts, the rents are pretty low. You get lots of space for your euro, and I have a shipment of boxes arriving soon from New York, all the books and records that have been sitting there in storage since I lived on Orchard Street.
b) I want to be near my favourite Berlin food market, the Turkish Maybuchufer market that operates, two days a week, alongside the Landwehrkanal. (This market was the site of my Fashion Muslim action last September.)
c) Districts like Prenzlauer Berg are full of yuppyish shops selling twee jewelry, expensive coffee, exotic chocolate and so on. They're full of middle class people and their children. Laidback, slow-paced, yet often uptight. (How can you be laidback yet uptight? The Germans manage it.)
d) Friedrichshain gets more and more like the Lower East Side; invaded at weekends by obnoxious people who bar-hop, ear-marked by developers who turn charmingly fusty buildings (like the big corner block on Kopernicus Strasse and Simon-Dach Strasse) into horrible "luxury apartment" complexes. The dirt and patina are being squeezed out. Money ruins everything.
e) I prefer Turkish-German culture to German-German culture. Turks, being Muslims, don't drink. They also don't rock, an important consideration! Their food is better than German food, they dress better than the Germans dress, and they embrace the sort of high-vitality, high-density lifestyles I prefer: Asian-style living.
f) Perhaps this is the most important thing, but it's the least definable: there's just some sort of magic in the corner of Neukölln where it meets Kreuzberg at the canal. It's got leafy cobbled streets, charming old buildings with atmospheric lobbies, lots of mature trees, grubby high-density bargain shopping (the kind I like) on the main streets, a subway line (the U8), water and fresh vegetables, immigrant exoticism. Yes, I refuse to condemn the exoticization of immigrants. Seeing immigrant quarters as "Romantic" or "exotic" is a valid counter-balance to seeing them as "problematical" or "undesireable".
g) I can sense that this area (eight or ten blocks) is on the cusp of something. In other words, there's a chance that this part of Neukölln (like Wedding, the other poor area currently being infiltrated by artists) will increasingly be a destination for creative people. There are already two or three art galleries on Bürknerstrasse. They're the kind of places which seem to be run entirely for the benefit of the owners, who sit outside on chairs, recognizing but ignoring others of their type and race. It's pretty much just Turks and creatives here at the moment, no yuppie babies, little dogs (with their little blobs of little dog shit), Thai restaurants or luxury apartment developments.
It's probably this "on the cusp" thing that I'm mostly responding to in this part of Neukölln. I really enjoy that feeling of being part of the birth of an area's hipness, that time when people open eccentric, short-lived businesses: funny cafes with shabby chairs and hardly anything to eat or drink, frequented by oddly-dressed people. Secret cinema clubs. That fragile period (it might last three, four years) before the real cafes and cinemas move in, and everything becomes marketed, slick, targeted, sewn-up.
Of course, even writing this "Neukölln-hype" I'm hastening the day these ten or so blocks at the north end of Neukölln become as trampled and herded as Bedford Avenue or Ludlow Street. But that day is still far off for "Berlin's worst district".
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 07:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 07:55 am (UTC)der.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 07:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 08:12 am (UTC)And yes, I don't get a danger vibe on the street at all. That's further south, I hear. (But not as far south as the "villagey bit".)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 08:13 am (UTC)I quite like Marzahn too, especially around the Vietnamese retail village, a secret wholesale enclave in what's basically a car-park surrounded by plattenbauten and industrial parks. But I'm not quite enough of an "urban pioneer" for that...
This reminds me
Date: 2006-06-05 09:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 09:25 am (UTC)does anyone know what that says?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 10:01 am (UTC)(Fate; fortune. Turkish, from Persian qismat, from Arabic qisma, lot, from qasama, to divide, allot.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 10:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 10:03 am (UTC)neukölln is definitely the next place to be invaded by hipsters trying to escape themselves, but if you move in now, you will still have time to claim that you lived there before it got cool.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 10:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 10:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 10:14 am (UTC)I've only been to Berlin once, but that's where I'd live if I moved there (which, if I could speak German, I probably would).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 10:19 am (UTC)I haven#t been there myself, but your experience shows how badly the media sometimes portrayes playes.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 12:34 pm (UTC)any creative turks, who dig post-urinal sesame street with names attached for some 'hairy rock and roll'? i'm quoting bowie the geezer on coke.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 12:43 pm (UTC)In London of course the high rise has become a room with a view in some cases.
Are there still squats in Neukoln? A friend lived there in the early eighties and pursued what Ian Dury once called "a healthy exploration of junk".
The "shock troops of gentrification" graffiti posted earlier is one way of seeing things. As you say, its a counter to the "problem" thinking that the "exoticisation" can stand.
Reminds me somehow of "Greene-land", from studies in English Lit of Graham Greene. Then again, that may be as weak an analogy as "Interzone".
May what you desire be just around the corner.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 01:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 02:38 pm (UTC)(good thing you met my girlfriend on saturday and not me, since i'm quite an ignoramus, when it comes to dance theatre ... write you an e-mail for some possible analogue meeting ...)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 02:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 02:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 03:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 03:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 03:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 03:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 03:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 04:19 pm (UTC)but: we have all the right reasons to flee to sasaya all the time!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 05:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 05:15 pm (UTC)New Artist
Date: 2006-06-05 05:28 pm (UTC)http://www.myspace.com/postfolk
Katie
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 05:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 06:11 pm (UTC)When do your Wired wires begin to appear? I looked you up and found no byline?
Cheers
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 06:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 07:15 pm (UTC)As I'm currently living in Berlin, I can definitely recommend Neukölln. It's cheap but definitely no "no-go" problem zone...and yes, it's going to be the next hip district - so go before it's too late!
no-go-areas in Berlin
Date: 2006-06-05 07:22 pm (UTC)Most of the clip is in German, but some of the statements are in English language.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 07:56 pm (UTC)Enjoy your stay.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-05 09:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-10 07:07 am (UTC)Well, is it far from galleries?
Cool concert halls ?
That's all I care.
Oh..and the gay-friendly too.
Gay-friendly spots are usually cool.
Don't you have friends you want to stay close too?
It sounds lonely, your thing.
I'm worried.
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
in google, i typed
Date: 2006-06-11 09:30 pm (UTC)ciao!
oh Jesus no!
Date: 2006-08-24 05:37 pm (UTC)alright, the galeries on bürknerstr. are nice and i must confess its quite convenient to have a cafe downstairs for morning cappucini, a little too trendy to my taste though... but is this the beginning of the end? i mean the beginning of the cafe-latte-soft-porn-sunglasses-i-look-great-you-dont thing that invaded first mitte, then prenzlauerberg (lets keep a minute of silence for the poor kastanienallee...)and is about to take schlesisches Tor? Let's resist! Lets all wear moustaches! Let it be just a "cusp" as you say ... let it be only a mirage of hipness...not in our back yards!!
(oh wow, i never thought id be so conservative one day and indeed i am, and it feels okay!)
Royal Dürüm
royal_M_T@tele2.it