Berlin Industrial Expo 1896

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A while a go, I went on an urban architecture tour with Ticket B (highly recommended!) to the Rummelsburg Bay. Though not exactly within the scope of the tour, the guide showed a map of the Berlin Industrial Exposition of 1896 at the starting point of the tour, Treptow Park station.

Now that map fascinated me for different reasons. I am very familiar with the Treptow park, where you’ll find me running several times per week all year round. It’s a very nice park, with access to river Spree, many old shady trees, extensive meadows, a romantic little lake, the Island of Youth (with one of my favorite beer gardens and a canoe rental), but also the truly monumental Soviet War Memorial, commemorating Red Army soldiers fallen in the Battle of Berlin in 1945.

What is now the park, was the grounds of the great expo in 1896. The map shows lots of infrastructure, many large building structures and ensembles of smaller buildings, e.g. replicas of the Spandau Old City and of villages in Cameroon, Togo and New Guinea – as the infamous German Colonial Exhhibition was a part of the expo.

Walking (or running) under the shade of the park’s trees today, you would not expect this place to have been host to all that. Apart from the Archenhold Observatory, hardly anything of it still exists. But traces of it can still be seen in the structure of the park. This applies most of all for the Soviet War Memorial, which is clearly build on the footprint of what once was the artificial New Lake (“Neuer See”).

I was glad to find this map at Wikimedia Commons. I georeferenced it and made a little interactive webmap of it using react-geo. As the map is not north-oriented, I used OpenLayer’s rotation controls to create a button that lets you switch to the original orientation of the map and back. Using the opacity controls, you can discover the remaining traces of the great expo in the design of today’s park.