A friend from New York came to Berlin a few weeks ago, and we wanted to show him something that most people don’t visit. This is why we took him to Nordbahnhof Park.
Park am Nordbahnhof, as it is known in German, is one of 2,500 public parks and gardens in Berlin. For those who don’t know, more than a third of the city comprises forests, parks, and rivers—almost a fifth of the city is covered with trees!
But back to Nordbahnhof Park. The area is defined by three different layers of history. The oldest layer is the railway installations of the old Stettin Railway Station that used to be there. The second layer is the border installations and the death strip of the Berlin Wall that can be found alongside the park.
Finally, the youngest layer is an urban wasteland that has been reclaimed by fast-growing nature filled with birch trees and birds.
The History of Nordbahnhof Park
Like many things in Berlin, Nordbahnhof Park started as something completely different. These things happen when a city has such a rich history as Berlin. This 5-acre park started out as Stettiner Bahnhof since the trains that arrived here would be coming from Pomerania and Stettin, the German way of writing the name of the Polish city Szczecin.
The station was first built in 1842, and a bigger station was built in 1876 with the increase in train travel. After the Second World War, the Soviet Union occupied Pomerania and handed the territory to Poland. In 1950, East Germany renamed the station Nordbahnhof in an effort to remove all traces of the former German territory.
1952, the station was closed due to heavy structural damage, and the train tracks that led through Nodbahnhof also led through West Berlin. Between 1955 and 1962, the station was demolished, but the train tracks were kept in place, and you can still see them today.
With the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the area around Nordbahnhof Park became a no-man’s land. Blocked by two separate pieces of the Berlin Wall, the area became a death strip, and you can still see where the watch towers used to be. The big piles of stone you can see in the pictures are where the towers used to be.
Nature and History Collide: A Walk Through Berlin’s Nordbahnhof Park
With the fall of the wall in 1989, the area’s nature sprung back to life, with birch trees and tall grass providing shelter to a small habitat for small animals and birds. Plans for a park started coming up as early as 1995, but it was only in 2004 that the project became real.
The park cost almost 3 million Euros and became what it is today.
If you walk long enough in the park, you will see something we like. Liesenbrücken lies at the end of the park, surrounded by a fence. This bridge used to connect the train tracks from Stettiner Bahnhof to the main railroad.
Nowadays, the bridge is under Denkmalschutz, and there were plans to form a connection between Volkspark Humboldthain and Nordbahnhof Park, but it seems that nothing is happening. As far as we can tell, the bridge is locked up and rusting.
When you reach the bridge, go out of the park, and you will be able to see a small hidden piece of the Berlin Wall. Situated inside the Saint Hedwig Cemetery, this is one of the many reasons why we like this park so much. If you watch Run Lola Run and pay a lot of attention, you can see that Lola runs close to this small piece of the Berlin Wall for a few moments.
Nature and a lot of history share the same place in this little oasis. And they are waiting for you to discover and protect the area. Nordbahnhof Park is surrounded by fences, and you can enter it through gates like what used to happen in classic garden designs. Behind those gates, you will walk along a little oasis in the middle of Berlin.
Returning to the train station, we decided to walk outside Nordbahnhof Park since it looked like the streets were covered in less ice. This is when we managed to find a tunnel that, we believe, goes under the old train tracks.
If this makes sense, those tunnels used to go under the Berlin Wall as well. If you walk alongside the park, you can see that there were more of those in the area, but it seems that they were bricked down a long time ago.
It’s too bad there was a heavy steel fence in front of it. We would love to go there and see what is there. Let’s hope one day, we will find that gate open.
All the pictures here were taken using a Canon PowerShot G3 X that we are testing for Canon.
From Train Station to Urban Oasis: The History and Transformation of Berlin’s Nordbahnhof Park
Gartenstraße / Caroline-Michaelis-Straße
10115, Berlin
