Friedrichshain's Spree riverbanks, including the East Harbor, are considered one of the city's liveliest. The harbor facilities are narrow and stretch for one to two kilometers between the Spree and a busy thoroughfare. In recent years, the music and fashion industries have been transforming the former industrial buildings into creative spaces. While this has lost the original charm of the old buildings, something new, exciting, and vibrant has emerged.
Friedrichshain's Spree riverbank boasts one of the liveliest and most beautiful river access points in the city, the Osthafen. Narrow but one to two kilometers long, the harbor facilities are tucked between the river and the six-lane highway that escorts the Spree from the Jannowitz Bridge to the Stralau Peninsula. While there are still gatehouses, visitors have unobstructed access to the railway tracks, warehouses, storage sheds, loading ramps, and the large overhead cranes that load barges with scrap or building materials. One of the two brick administrative buildings is the old workers' dining hall, now a bright, friendly harbor canteen, open weekdays from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. and featuring a small summer garden facing the Spree. The river is more stately in this section and, with the confluences of the Flutgraben and Landwehrkanal on the opposite, Kreuzberg-Treptower bank, also more lively than elsewhere. Before reunification, the harbor was an important transshipment point for the major construction sites on the outskirts of East Berlin. Today, the hustle and bustle has dwindled to a tranquil level and merges with the atmosphere of the river to create a melancholic swan song for the industrial world of work.
The end of the industrial idyll between the Oberbaum Bridge and the Elsen Bridge, predicted for 2007, has long since arrived. The music and fashion industries have taken over the old buildings, transforming them into studios, showrooms, lofts, and bistros. The symmetry of the old complex—two mid-sized administrative buildings and the flat, elongated warehouses to the left and right—has been lost to new blocks and glass extensions. But anyone who laments the old harbor canteen described above can take comfort in the fact that the Universal music company moved into the former egg cold storage facility in 2002. Its canteen is open to the public and, in terms of interior design and its magnificent location above the Spree, is one of the most beautiful canteen locations in the city.
The promenade belongs to strollers. Cyclists buzz by like fleeting thoughts. Every now and then a boat creaks, a dog barks, the water gurgles against the sheet pile walls. The traffic roars just a few meters away, but here it seems shielded, almost otherworldly.
At the Oberbaum Bridge, Berlin suddenly becomes romantic. Battlements, towers, a hint of fairytale – as if someone had stretched a Prussian toy castle over the Spree. Its red brick casts deep reflections in the water, so sharply defined that you have to look twice to know which way is up and which way is down.
Behind it begins the new Osthafen harbor: brick gives way to glass, warehouses become lofts, and the Spree watches in amazement at what's happening. A hotel hangs like a futuristic bar over the sidewalk – architecture that aims not only to impress but also to disturb. The colors of life here are pink and chrome, with a cocktail in hand and Wi-Fi at heart. A few meters away stands a new building, as if someone had ordered it from a streamlined catalog – elegantly curved, yet serenely peaceful.
And yet, amidst all the design and staging, there remains space for quiet moments. For a view across the water, for the echoes of history, for a leisurely conversation. The Spree flows as it always has – through warehouses, through luxury, through noise and silence.
Translated by Google •
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