Last week my friend Haley and I decided to explore the neighborhood of Neukölln. It’s not Berlin’s biggest neighborhood, nor its most well known. It’s probably best known for being misspelled as a song title on David Bowie’s album Heroes, but it’s supposedly up and coming and where the cool kids like Herr Ben hang out. In fact, he recommended to us to go check it out and by this point he’s at least 12/12 on recommendations. Neukölln is actually a pretty small neighborhood, with only a couple of U-Bahn stops within it. With it’s high immigrant population and small size, the area is often referred to as a baby Kreuzberg, the hip and cool Turkish neighborhood in Berlin where we go fairly often, and with its underground grungy status it’s kind of like Sunnyside, Queens to Kreuzberg’s Williamsburg and Prenzlauer Berg’s Park Slope (I’ll leave NYC geography now). Its main street is also named Karl-Marx Straße even though it was located in the not Communist former West Berlin, if that says anything about it’s character.
After getting out of the U-Bahn at Karl-Marx Straße, Haley and I were at a bit of a loss, as it quickly became apparent neither of us did any research on things to do in the area. Fortunately she had an actual real life map on her, the first one I’ve seen since our family vacation to Maine in 2003. We first walked off the beaten path filled with Turkish stores selling discount shoes and cell phones into a small park, where we found an abandoned beer garden promising ice cream. I say abandoned, but it was also 3:30 on a Wednesday and there was a family sitting there, just no service, or ice cream, in sight.
Imagine something like this, but dirtier
We continued along the side streets and a small open market catches our eyes. I’m still not sure whether this was a market or a bulk trash dispensary, because everything was organized into sections with stands, but nothing had a price label and I didn’t see anyone actually working there.The depot was also blasting great electronic music from 2012 from speakers of unknown location. This place had everything though, from used cleaning supplies to books from the 1950’s, to disgustingly dirty beer steins, to swords, like actual swords (they were a little dull but they came with a sheath and everything).
The new shoes. Photo Credit: Justin Barbin
Afterwards, we made our way back to Karl-Marx Straße where we were swayed by the discount shoe prices (be warned that cheap shoes come with the price of blisters) and then decided to go to a place called the Körnerpark, named after a guy named Körner, not because its in the corner of Neukölln as I had thought. This wasn’t any old park though, this park has a secret; while it may look like a regular park, it was actually built on a gravel pit! (actual quote from Haley’s guidebook).
What was once a gravel pit is no longer
There was a surprising, free contemporary art museum focusing on green design in a small orangery (real word) in the park that we inadvertently ended up walking into, but then we got distracted by a cute dog outside and decided to sit on the lawn. As with most days in Berlin, it started to rain on us, so we headed home, but our adventure through Neukölln was certainly one to remember.