Kastanienallee: Squats, Trams and Chestnut Trees
Why is it significant?
Stop for a moment on the pavement and let a yellow tram clatter past you up the hill. The street is narrow, lined with chestnut trees that give it its name, and every ground floor seems to hold a café, a record shop or a tiny boutique.
Key Facts
| Place | Kastanienallee: Squats, Trams and Chestnut Trees |
|---|---|
| Address | Kastanienallee, 10435 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.53710, 13.40790 |
| Part of Walk | Candles and Courtyards: Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, from 1933 to the Autumn of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop for a moment on the pavement and let a yellow tram clatter past you up the hill. The street is narrow, lined with chestnut trees that give it its name, and every ground floor seems to hold a café, a record shop or a tiny boutique. Berliners have a mocking nickname for it: not Kastanienallee, but Casting-Allee, the casting avenue, because everybody here looks as if they are auditioning for something.
Look at the facades, though, and you will see that not all of them are freshly painted. Some houses still wear graffiti and banners, and a few carry slogans from the years right after the Wall fell. In 1990, in the strange months between the fall of the GDR and reunification, nobody was quite sure who owned the crumbling buildings of Prenzlauer Berg, and young people from East and West occupied empty houses all over the district.
One of them, number 77, became a self-run art and housing project known as K77, in a house said to be among the oldest in the district, from the middle of the nineteenth century. Unlike the violent eviction battles in Friedrichshain in November 1990, many squats here ended with negotiated contracts, and some of those collectives still live in their houses today.
The fight that followed was quieter but just as fierce: renovation, rising rents, and the departure of most of the people who had lived here before 1989. Prenzlauer Berg became the most famous example of gentrification in Germany, and Kastanienallee is where you can still read that whole story in a single block... a squat banner on one house, a designer shop in the next.
The trams on this street are a little piece of continuity. West Berlin tore out nearly all its tram lines after the war, while the East kept them, which is why yellow trams still rattle through Prenzlauer Berg and hardly anywhere in the old West. Keep walking up Kastanienallee towards the elevated railway, and look for a gateway under chestnut trees and the old sign of a beer garden.