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, or so the real estate agents keep saying, but right now it’s as if I had moved to a different country.

Instead of Wilhelmine masterpieces complete with intricate masonry, mosaics and cherubs, what Wedding has is monolithic mass-produced row houses, with an emphasis on the word “row.” The building I reside in is the epitome of standardization and literally occupies the entire block. The building is arranged into a giant ring, not unlike a panopticon, but with trash bins taking the place of the all-seeing eye in the middle. It reminds me of the scene in “The Matrix” where Neo wakes up in a pod tower, except that here the tower is oriented horizontally instead of vertically. I look forward to being rescued from my balcony by a hovercraft.

As in any gentrification frontier, there are bright spots and “green shoots” of course. For example, it seems that one of my greatest Berlin vexations—the sound of breaking glass—is not permitted here. In Kreuzberg every building has special bins for glass, conveniently located in the middle of the inner courtyard so that the cacophony of smashing bottles echoes as widely as possible, but I have yet to see a glass bin in Wedding, an unexpected triumph of local zoning. Another green shoot is that as far as I can tell, the only proper cafe employing actual baristas in all of Wedding just happens to be situated across the street from my mega-building, close enough that I could quaff an espresso in my pajamas. Coincidence or fate? But more about that later!