Berlin - Frankfürter Allee

From the eastern corner of Alexanderplatz in Berlin the six-lane street now known as Frankfürter Allee (formerly Karl-Marx-Allee) leads via the oval-shaped Strausberger Platz to the Friedrichshain City Hall. It began life in 1953 as "Stalin Allee" and was to be the showpiece of the DDR leaders who wanted to build cheap, well-equipped workers' flats along a "socialist" main street. They constructed large apartment buildings clad in Meissen tiles in the "wedding-cake style" of the Stalin era, fitted with such luxuries as central heating and waste-disposal units, to be let at low rents. However, they proved too expensive to build and the design was changed to a simpler form using the tried and tested concrete slab method. Today the whole of the street is under a protection order and the houses are being refurbished. A part of German history was written here, when the anger felt by the workers at the excessively high targets they were set led to the riots of June 17, 1953.