I lived on Osloer Straße for six weeks. Six weeks was enough time to learn street names, to repeat the same routes until they become routine, and to predict which cousin was on shift at the family-owned kebab shop on the corner. Each time I walked from the train station to my hotel room door, I trusted my feet more and let my mind wonder more wildly as the route became familiar. I learned micro-routes to capitalize on shade, or make street crossings more efficient. But confidence leads to complacency, and elements of my surroundings inevitable faded into the background.
The entrance to the hotel off of Osloer Straße was through an arched passageway about four metres long. It opened into a courtyard patio and a revolving door entrance to the hotel lobby beyond. When I returned home to my window on the first floor, I walked through this passage without much thought. I did not realize that above me was five floors of apartments, and nearly a centuries worth of memories of past tenants.
Beginning my research into the view from my window, I found my building in the State Monuments Office Berlin database. Built in 1910 for the machine tool company Hasse & Wrede, I was surprised to see it dually listed as a commercial and an apartment building. The building description mentions the “stately” five storey front apartments that hid the adjoining factory courtyard. I sat at my desk and tried to recall the front of the building, but all that came to mind was the glass canopy above the slopped landing where tour buses often unloaded groups of teenagers on sports teams. In a strange reversal, it was the the building’s front apartments that had been rendered invisible to me by the significance of the hotel entrance beyond. I read the architect of the building listed on the State Monument website. The Hasse and Wrede factory on Osloer Straße was designed and built by architect George Heyer. About his design, the State Monuments Office states, “Georg Heyer broke away from the rigid tenement building scheme in order to improve the quality of living.”
The tenements were a housing solution brought in by James Holbrecht in 1862 as part of his General Development Plan for Berlin. The industrialization boom at the time meant Berlin’s population was growing fast. It doubled from the year 1864 to 1874, and industrial workers made up almost sixty percent of newcomers in 1900. Composed of rental barracks with inner courtyards that became more gloomy, dark, and damp the further back they receded from the street, tenement buildings were organized based on class. Those rich enough to afford the front apartments had access to the luxuries of light, space, and elegance, while the poorer tenants lived in damp and badly ventilated apartments in the back. While front apartments had their own bathrooms, those living in the side wings further back shared washrooms and pissoirs in adjoining hallways. Kirsty Bell’s house was a front apartment in a tenement built in the mid 1800s. In The Undercurrents, Bell shared a 1899 letter from a tenant in the side wing of her building addressed to the police department. The author, Johann Tresp, complains of the constant dampness in his quarters which was causing his furniture to rot and his children to be ill.
Presumably, being a largely industrial area, Wedding and Gesundbrunnen was likely home to many industrial workers. Lars Pechmann, owner of Offside Pub & Whiskey Bar Berlin, conducted his own research on Gesundbrunnen from his vantage point on Jülicher Straße, a few blocks from the Hasse and Wrede building. He writes that the population in Wedding and Gesundbrunnen went from only 350 residents in 1820 to 140,000 residents in 1900. With tenement buildings being built in the thousands leading up to the turn of the century, likely many of them lived in the poor living conditions that Kirsty Bell reflects on in The Undercurrents.
It was clear when I finally did examine the apartments facing Osloer Straße on the front of my building, that George Heyer designed the residential portion with light and ventilation available for every suite. I stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the stately curved archways on the balconies opening off of every apartment. I stepped over a discarded baby stroller and peered through street grime coated windows, and saw a hallway that lead directly to another exit on the opposite end. Both doors could be open to allow a cross-breeze to flow over the checker patterned floor tiles. The possibility for cross-ventilation continued on every floor. The windows that faced the street had a window opposite it that looked out on the courtyard side on the building.
In 1910 when the Hasse and Wrede building was built, the construction of tenement housing had slowed. Perhaps the reason was a combination of a plateau in the demand for housing, and protests about the standard of living in the lower tier apartments. When George Heyer designed the Hasse and Wrede building however, the population in Wedding and Gesundbrunnen was still growing quickly. Pechmann reports the population of the districts growing from 140,000 in 1900 to 251,000 fourteen years later. These numbers suggest that there was a need for more, and better-designed, housing in Gesundbrunnen, but why had Heyer’s design for a large machine tool factory included apartments at all?
George Heyer was early in his career and already a widower when he was hired by machine tool fabricators Carl Hasse and Julius Wrede of Hasse and Wrede. He had completed one building project in Shöneberg with architect A. Weber in 1908, and married his second wife, Lina Esther Irma Lohmann, in 1909. Ten years later, Heyer formed a not-for-profit housing company called “Luisenhof.” With Luisenhof he built a housing estate in Berlin-Reinickendorf designed for low-income residents. In 1920 Heyer purchased a brick factory that had fallen into disuse on the shores of Lake Ruppin. He was later joined on the settlement by other artists, builders, and craftsmen including Max Eckardt and Otto Bartning, and Adolf Meyer, who together built the settlement up with rows of detached houses with hip roofs interrupted by spacious courtyard gardens. With the values of Bauhaus and Werkbund integral to the design, the settlement was built for self-sufficient residents with low-incomes. From 1918 to 1948, George Heyer wrote several articles emphasizing the economic connection to social housing, illustrating his ideas for housing reform in Berlin. In 1944 he published New Apartments - New Towns which included his idea for post war housing redevelopment. He wanted the city to be reshaped based on single row housing with standardized fire bomb proof construction. His vision for the city went largely unnoticed in the chaos of the last months of war, and he fell into financial hardship that lasted the remainder of his life. He died in 1949 of a heart attack at the age of 69.
George Heyer’s brought his visions for low-income housing that incorporated a heightened standard of living than previously established by tenement barracks to the design of the Hasse & Wrede apartments on Osloer Straße. I looked up at the windows in the front apartments of the Hasse and Wrede building, and imagined living there. The windows overlooking Osloer Straße were North-facing, so the balconies would have been pleasant to sit on even on hot June days like the ones I endured during my residency. The tram that now runs between two lanes of vehicle traffic on either side was built in 1928, but perhaps in 1910 some of the trees that grew along the tracks were beginner to establish roots. After reading about George Heyer’s career, I started to think of these apartments as a precursor to his later housing developments in Berlin-Reinickendorf. He clearly cared deeply about liveable conditions in low-income rentals. I imagined him across from the design table with Hasse and Wrede, advocating the inclusion of living spaces in the factory site to serve the obvious housing need in Gesundbrunnen and Wedding. Now they stood vacant, no one lived there to enjoy the shady balconies overlooking the street.
Buried in the links to Trip Advisor, and other hotel related hits in the results of my search query about the Hasse & Wrede building, I find an article from a housing advocacy group called “Rent Madness North.” The top of the page has a photo of protestors outside Heyer’s front apartments. One protestor holds a sign that says, “housing for everyone” another says “Stop vacancy in Wedding & everywhere.” The article detailed the recent history of the building and its transformation into a hotel. It revealed that as a result of demolition work carried out by the owners, the front apartments could no longer be used for residential purposes. The protest took place January of 2021, with the goal of bringing the apartment’s vacancy and disrepair to the attention of the Wedding and Gesundbrunnen residents.
Over the six weeks that I stayed in the Hasse & Wrede building, I passed under those apartment countless times. I began to let my mind wonder while I walked from my house to the café or the grocery store, because my feet knew the way. One day when I paused to pack my groceries after going through the checkout, a woman walked up to me and asked if I could take a quick survey about the store's flyer delivery program in the neighbourhood. Her face fell when she realized I did not qualify because I had no permanent address. Later, outside my room door as I juggled my grocery bags and my electronic key card, I thought about my place in Berlin. Could I say I “lived” somewhere when my door unlocked with a piece of re-programmable plastic? Was I responsible, or at least complacent in the gentrification process that was creeping its way North to Wedding and Gesundbrunnen? After learning about the building and George Heyer, I felt like I was earning my place in my Berlin neighbourhood. Becoming confident while navigating the streets surrounding my building brought a feeling of intimacy, ownership, and even belonging. But confidence leads to complacency, and I was determined not to let more of my surroundings fade into the background.