As I had liked Teufelsberg a lot, I decided to go on some more "advanced" Urban Exploration. I had been searching the internet before as UE has always fascinated me, and had found a
website dedicated to UE in Berlin. As one would expect, a huge, old city like Berlin has lots of UE sites, and especially a rather poor one still very much in the process of modernisation.
Searching for a location close to where I lived (as a lot of the locations are far out of the city and not accessible by public transport), I found an interesting one:
an old Brewery. You may notice there is no address on that website, this is because the writers deem the brewery to be in very good shape and want to protect it from the kind of people who so elaboratly trashed Teufelsberg. I won't post the address either, but if you really want to go there: google. That's what I did, and it's not that hard to find.
The location is now listed as a "
brownfield" and is awaiting future development. I don't know if the brewery located there simply moved to a new factory or went bankrupt - some googling learns me it was bought by another brewery which went bankrupt later on...
The plant dates back to the end of the 1800's, and was closed in the beginning of the 1990's. It's a huge complex consisting of several buildings and warehouses, and offers an interesting mix of old and long unused brick buildings and more recent, modern warehouses and offices. It was a complete brewery, with stock and transport facilities for grain, tanks and brewing machinery, bottling infrastructure and all that is required to make those things work like offices, maintenance rooms, laboratories, tool stocks, kitchen, mess and sanitary facilities. I walked around for more than two hours, exploring most of the site but unable to find entrance to one big building and to another part of the site, separated by a wall.
Also, infuriatingly enough, my camera batteries died after about two hours and I had forgotten to take my cell phone with me (not that smart, would I have wound up at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a broken leg..) so I didn't really want to spend too long - and I missed some great pictures as well.
I had taken my flashlight this time however, which was pretty useful at times.
I was intending to go there very early in the morning to avoid detection, however my "very early" turned out to be "a time most people go to work". Most people are weird.
It's easy to enter the location, the main gate is locked but my grandma can climb over it. After that I was on my own - nobody to be seen. There was some activity at a factory next to it, but nobody payed attention to me.
The site is in very good condition: most of the stuff is still there (although thrown around and often damaged), most of the windows and doors are still intact, no arsoning and the graffitti is mainly the good kind - not much idiotic tagging yet.
Going bankrupt is an easy way to get rid of your chemical waste. The company cleaning this site up will have fun. The third picture was a door to a nice and big house, which propably once was the house of the owner of the company, and later used as offices. The house seems to be pretty upperclass, with some stained glass and lots of elaborate woodwork.
Huge, old safe stacked with diamonds and gol - ehm, empty.
This Maschinenhaus seems to be the location where once brewing tanks were located, however those are removed, propably sold to another company or simply taken out for the copper (as most brewing tanks seem to be made of copper?). The door next to the office chair on the second picture is the way to enter the maschinehaus.
I guess the first explorers after the factory was closed found all doors and gates locked (most still were) and simply chose the doors which were easiest to pry open. Some metal clearly showed crowbar marks, glass doors were cracked and then opened. Must have been a strange work for the workers to "mothball" the factory (very well knowing it would most likely stay empty until demolishing), maybe they were the people who worked there all their lives.
Central picture on top shows what is - I think - a foot on which a brewing tank once stood. Picture at the bottom right shows the operator room.
Now we're leaving the Maschinenhaus and will check out some other areas - of which there are enough :)
The room with the warning on the door seems to be part of a row of old rooms which were not used for a long time. Check out the writing on the door, which doesn't look like it was written even in the last half century :)
After this I entered a big hall, again with all machinery removed and a large pile of isolation garbage in one side. There was a control room with some stuff left, including a technical logbook and even a postcard sent a long time ago from a sunny location to the collegues in the brewery.
The center picture at the bottom was made at what supposedly were grain stocks. Picture down at the right shows how graffitti can actually be interesting :)
Something which isn't captured on the photos is the smell inside decaying buildings, which is a mix of mold and wet plaster. I couldn't stand it anymore once I left the place :)
Next pictures are of a pretty modern operation board for another part of the factory - the machinery gone off course, as well as most of the PLC electronic controlling boards (stolen?). More vandalism here (broken windows), which causes the board to rust quickly. The picture on the right is of the hall which was right next to the control room - supposedly once full of machinery controlled by the operator board.
The two pictures above on the right must once have been the mess with kitchen, kitchen machinery lined up in the main hall, never to be picked up. There were other areas where stuff was stocked away, apparently with the intention to take it away later. Strangely, the radiator in the toilet has disappeared, maybe because they are easy to transport and contain a lot of metal...
One room/large closet in another building (when my batteries were dead) was locked shut and had the message "please leave here, property of the brewery" (in German, off course). Maybe the moving out was performed by a third-party company, and the brewery officials had locked the room to pick up some stuff later on (I don't think the message was directed to looters...). However, the doors were still locked so I guess nobody had come.
Seems to be a trabant pick-up, although a quick google learns me the company never made real pick-ups, so it must be custom-made. It's quite possible this car arrived after the decomissioning of the factor, as well.
This big hall contained some very weird stuff: old cars, some of them even with number plate, and "decoration" of all kinds. Check out the next pictures as well:
A "wtf" seems to be in order. Some hippies using the place as storage room?
In this hall were stairs allowing entrance to another part of the building, which seems to have contained the bottling infrastructure, small laboratory and some electronic parts stocks. That part of the building was only accessible through those stairs, als the doors outside had been locked shut thoroughly with heavy steel bars bolted to the door framing. However, the large sheetmetal gates to the hall must have been easy to force open.
These pictures are from a recent office building, still lots of stuff left. Safe was locked, but I'm pretty sure nothing was left inside :).
Some last pictures - camera dead after these. I missed some cool pics of electronic part stocks and a small laboratory.
Strangely, I don't recognize a lot of the pictures on the exploreberlin webpage. Maybe these were taken in the building I didn't visit.
I don't know what the first picture is. Some kind of water storage? Last picture must once have been a big rolling crane. It was on the other side of a wall siding the brewery so I don't know if it was part of the factory, doesn't seem like a brewerey would need a heavy crane like that either.
After all this one was much more interesting than Teufelsberg because of the contrast between the old and new buildings and simply the sheer size of the location. The good condition made it much more interesting as well, lots of artefacts around which give you an idea what a room or place was used for and how people spent lots of their time there.
I took a couple of souvenirs with me; a beer bottle label (with the production date filled in at 1993) and a badass DDR-era 50A 500V fuse (made in Annaberg, where MSchneider still produces all kinds of industrial fuses).
Felt kind of wrong taking stuff with me, however the bottle labels were laying on knee-deep heaps in a storage room and there were loads of small electric parts all over the place.
Last monday, tuesday and wednesday I spent in Prague at the apartment of a friend. I had been there already last year, so I had seen all the famous tourists sights already. I decided to focus on art galleries as I had liked those I had visited in Berlin, and Prague has quite a lot of those.
The rudolfinum (first picture in this post). This is one of Pragues main concert halls and in the side is a nice art gallery, which now has an extensive exhibition of work of one of the most famous contemporary German painters: Georg Baselitz. The building is very nice inside with tall ceilings and lots of decoration.
Right next to the rudolfinum (in terms of niceness/interestingness) comes the Museum Kampa, on the banks of the Moldau with view on the Charles Bridge. The museum houses a big and diverse private contemporary art collection, open to the public. There are special exhibitions as well, although I sadly missed the Cobra exhibition which closed at the end of september. The building itself has artistic touches as well, with a nice glass roof terrace and a row of light-emitting orange penguins on the water (Charles Bridge visible too on the picture at the left). Anyway, very interesting museum, not too expensive and you can easily spend a couple of hours there.
