Wedding: On the Frontier
My friends were right to warn me against moving from Kreuzberg to Wedding. As the world’s worst cook and a lifelong vegetarian, I’m in constant danger of starvation here in Wedding. There are almost no restaurants in my new neighborhood (near Osloer Straße) except Croatian ones where chicken is considered a vegetable, and vile chains like McDonald’s. The food delivery service Wolt refuses to deliver to my address, apparently because they don’t consider it part of Berlin, and they have a point. Wedding was traditionally a place no one lived if they could avoid it. That’s partly because it was bombed nearly flat during WWII and consequently lacks the charming 19th century buildings that are ubiquitous in other parts of Berlin. Another important reason is that residents were subjected to intolerable noise from Tegel airport, which it abuts. But now that Tegel is closed forever and morphing into a developer’s wet dream, Wedding is slowly gentrifying. It’ll be the new Kreuzberg in ten years