The square until the beginning of the 18th century
In the 13th century, the Spital Heiliger Georg (St. George's Hospital) was built not far from today's square. It was the name giver for the Georgentor in the Berlin city wall, which was initially called Oderberger Tor after its direction. At that time, the area in front of the gate was largely undeveloped. Around the year 1400, the first settlers settled here in poor thatched cottages. Since the gallows were not far away, people called the place "Devil's pleasure garden". In front of this entrance to the town, the most important roads coming from the north and northeast converged, for example from Oderberg, Prenzlau and Bernau, but also the roads from the large Hanseatic towns on the Baltic Sea. At first the square was simply called Platz vor dem Stadttor. In the immediate vicinity outside the city wall were the burial grounds of the St. Marien and St. Nikolai parishes.
After the Thirty Years' War the city wall was reinforced. From 1658 to 1683 a fortification ring was built according to the plans of the Linz master builder Johann Gregor Memhardt. Memhardt's first activity was a topographical survey, which resulted in the first plan of the residential city. The new fortress contained 13 bastions connected by ramparts. In front of the fortress was a moat up to 50 meters wide. During the construction of the fortress ring, some gates were closed, for example the Stralau Gate to the southeast. This made the Georgentor even more important. The fact that Alexanderplatz did not have the usual rectangular shape can be explained - as with Hackescher Markt - by its location between the ramparts.
In the area in front of the Georgentor, the Great Elector had favourable plots of land allocated, waiving the ground rent, so that the settlements grew up quickly. In 1681, cattle trading and pig fattening were banned within the city. A cattle market was established on the square in front of the Georgentor, which gave the square the name Ochsenmarkt or Ox Square, and a weekly market was also established.
Thus, at the end of the 17th century, a suburb slowly developed around the square - the Georgenvorstadt - which continued to thrive despite a building ban in 1691, so that by 1700 more than 600 houses had already been built. Unlike the suburbs in the southwest of Berlin (Friedrichstadt, Dorotheenstadt), which were laid out in a planned and strictly geometrical manner, the suburbs in the northeast (in addition to Georgenvorstadt also Spandauer Vorstadt and Stralauer Vorstadt) sprawled haphazardly.
At that time, the Georgentor was a rectangular tower building in whose tower rooms sat guards who had to close the gate with heavy oak planks at nightfall. In addition, the upper floors housed the town jail. Next to the tower was another of the towers of the medieval city wall. A drawbridge spanned the moat. To the northeast, the Landstraße led across the Viehmarkt in the direction of Bernau. To the right of the Landstraße stood the Georgen Chapel as well as a hospital and an orphanage donated by the Electress Sophie Dorothea in 1672. Next to the chapel was the medieval plague house, which was demolished in 1716 due to dilapidation. Behind it there was a shooting range and an inn, the later Stelzenkrug. Towards the end of the 17th century there were already 600 to 700 families living in this area, including numerous butchers, cattle masters, shepherds and dairymen. The Georgen Chapel was upgraded to the Georgen Church and got its own preacher.
King's Thor Square (1701-1805)
After the Prussian King Frederick I entered Berlin through the Georgentor after his coronation in Königsberg on 6 May 1701, this was now called Königstor. The square was given the name Königs Thor Platz in official documents. Also the Georgenvorstadt was now called Königsvorstadt (or Königsstadt for short). In 1734, the Berlin Customs Wall was built, which initially consisted of a palisade fence and united the suburbs that had grown in a ring around the old city. As a result, the gate lost its importance and was finally demolished in 1746. By the end of the 18th century, the basic structure of the Königsvorstadt was created with irregular blocks, due to the streets leading off from the gate in different directions. Large manufactories (silk and wool) such as the Kurprinz (one of the city's first cloth factories in a former barn) and a workhouse (established in 1758), which acted as an asylum for beggars and the homeless and where inmates were required to work in the treadmill, which was used to power a real mill.
Between 1752 and 1755 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing lived in a house on Alexanderplatz. In 1771, a new stone bridge over the fortress moat (the Königsbrücke) was built on the site of the Königstor (King's Gate), and the Königskolonnaden (King's Colonnades), planned by Carl von Gontard, were erected on its sides in 1777, with sales facilities below. From 1783 to 1784, seven three-storey buildings erected by Georg Christian Unger were built around the square, including the famous Gasthof zum Hirschen, where Heinrich von Kleist lived in the last days before his suicide and where Karl Friedrich Schinkel was also a permanent tenant for some time.
After the Seven Years' War, the Kingdom of Prussia had stabilized as a state and the Old Fritz focused on more military facilities. He commissioned the master builder David Gilly to erect a riding and drill hall on the area next to Königsplatz. For this, the graves had to be removed or they were simply built over. The protesting church congregations were appeased by the king with, among other things: "... If the soldiers practiced there, the dead would have conviviality after all." The military hall, inaugurated in 1800, was about 80 m long and 17 m wide. Foundation remains as well as the remains of the cemetery (35 graves) were examined and documented during archaeological excavations in autumn 2019 under the direction of Torsten Dressler. The drill hall and the adjacent parade ground now dominated the area for almost 150 years.
In the 19th century, the residents around the square were mostly craftsmen, petty bourgeois, decommissioned soldiers and manufactory workers. The southern part of the later Alexanderplatz was separated from traffic by trees and served as a parade ground, whereas the northern half remained a market. From the middle of the 18th century, the most important wool fair in Germany was held here every year in June.
Significance of the square for the residential city of Berlin (1805-1900)
On the parade ground in front of the old King's Gate, the Russian Tsar Alexander I was received for a visit on 25 October 1805. On the occasion of this event, King Frederick William III issued the following decree on November 2 renaming the square Alexanderplatz:
"Since His Royal Majesty, by means of the Highest Cabinet Order of the 2nd of this month, has decided to give the name Kaiserstrasse to the Sandgasse in the Königs-Vorstadt, and the name Alexander-Platz to the square in front of the workhouse in the same suburb, this is hereby announced to the public for their information and respect.
- Royal Prussian Police Directorate
In the southeast of the square, the cloth manufactory building was rebuilt into the Königstädter Theater by Carl Theodor Ottmer on behalf of the merchant Cerf for 120,000 thalers. The foundation stone was laid on 31 August 1823 and the theatre opened on 4 August 1824. For financial reasons the theatre had to close on 3 June 1851. After that, the building was first used as a wool magazine, later as a tenement and until its demolition in 1932 as the Aschinger Inn.
The Alexanderplatz was populated in these years by fishwives, water carriers, sandmen, Plundermatzen (= rag merchants or rag collectors), scissor grinders and Eckenstehern (= day labourers, compare Eckensteher Nante).
Because of its importance as a traffic junction, horse-drawn omnibuses ran from here to Potsdamer Platz every quarter of an hour as early as 1847.
During the March Revolution of 1848, street fighting also broke out on Alexanderplatz. Revolutionaries blocked the way from the square into the city with barricades. Theodor Fontane, who worked in a pharmacy nearby, also participated in the construction of these barricades and later described how he helped barricade Neue Königstraße with material from the Königstädter Theater: "It went away across Alexanderplatz towards the Königstädter Theater, which was soon taken by storm.
In the 19th century, the entire royal city continued to grow, with three-storey buildings already reached at the beginning of the century and four-storey buildings by the middle of the century. By the end of the century, most buildings were already five-storey. The large manufactories and military facilities gave way to residential development (mainly rented housing for the new factory workers who moved into the city) and commercial buildings.
At the beginning of the 1870s, the Berlin administration had the former fortress moat filled in in order to build the Berlin Stadtbahn (city railway) on it, which was opened in 1882 and with it the Alexanderplatz light railway station. In 1883-1884 the Grand Hôtel was built, a neo-Renaissance building with 185 rooms and shops on the ground floor facing the square. From 1886 to 1890 Hermann Blankenstein also built the police headquarters, a huge brick building with a northern corner tower dominating the building. The district court at Alexanderplatz was also built by 1890.
In 1886, the city fathers built a central market hall west of the city railway, whereupon the weekly market on Alexanderplatz was banned in 1896. Due to the freed-up space, the square was now functionally divided. While at the end of the 19th century the emerging individual traffic and the first horse-drawn bus lines dominated the northern part, the southern part (the former parade ground) was quieter, and the garden director Hermann Mächtig landscaped it in 1889. In the northwest of the square, Emil Hundrieser's 7.5-meter-high copper Berolina statue was erected in 1895 on a second, smaller green space.
Around the turn of the century, an area - today mainly used as a shopping district - developed near Alexanderplatz. The so-called Scheunenviertel was home to many poor people. In the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, the conditions at that time are impressively described.
heyday between the Empire and the Nazi era (1900-1940)
At the beginning of the 20th century, Alexanderplatz experienced its heyday. In 1901 Ernst von Wolzogen founded the first German cabaret, the Überbrettl, in the former Secession stage at Alexanderstraße 40, initially under the name Buntes Brettl. According to the announcements, it offered "cabaret as upscale entertainment with artistic pretensions. Emperor-loyal and market-oriented, the uncritical amusement is in the foreground".
Also in the first half of the 19th century, a conversion of the still existing drill hall took place, it became the Small Alex Hall and was quickly accepted by the Berliners. For the temporary storage of goods, the hall received brick basement rooms.
The merchants Hermann Tietz, Georg Wertheim and Friedrich Hahn now had large department stores built on the square, which were named after their owners: Tietz (1904-1911), Wertheim (1910-1911) and Hahn (1911). In October 1905, the first phase of the Tietz department store opened at Alexanderplatz, planned by the architects Wilhelm Albert Cremer and Richard Wolffenstein, who had already won second prize in the competition to build the Reichstag building. It saw itself as a department store for the people of Berlin, while the Wertheim department store defined itself more as a cosmopolitan department store for the world. The Tietz department store underwent further construction phases and in 1911 finally had a covered floor area of 7300 square metres and at that time the longest department store façade in the world with a length of 250 metres. For the construction of the Wertheim department store, a branch of the store on Leipziger Platz, designed by the architects Heinrich Joseph Kayser and Karl von Großheim, the Königskolonnaden had to be demolished in 1910 and have since stood in Heinrich-von-Kleist-Park in Schöneberg.
In October 1908, the Lehrervereinshaus designed by Hans Toebelmann and Henry Groß was inaugurated at Alexanderstraße 41 next to the Bunten Brettl. The building owner was the Berlin Teachers' Association, which used the commercial building with a confectionery and restaurant on the ground floor as a source of rental income. In the rear area of the property up to Kurze Straße, the association had its administration building and a hotel wing for association members as well as a hall building for events. Among other things, the funeral service for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg took place here on 2 February 1919, as well as the unification party congress of the KPD and USPD on 4 December 1920. The pedagogical library of the teachers' association found its place in this building. It survived two world wars here as the German Teachers' Library and is today incorporated into the Library for Research into the History of Education.
The revival of the square was favoured by its function as a traffic junction. In addition to the three underground subway lines (from 1913 and 1930 respectively), the long-distance and suburban trains stopped here on the viaduct arches of the Stadtbahn, omnibuses and, from 1877, horse-drawn and, from 1898, electric trams, which ran from here in a star pattern in all directions. Thus five levels of traffic were created. The underground station was designed by Alfred Grenander and was in the dark red of the colour sequence of underground stations, which began with green at Leipziger Platz. In the Golden Twenties, Alexanderplatz, along with Potsdamer Platz, was the epitome of Berlin's vibrant cosmopolitan city. Many of the buildings and railway bridges bordering it bore large neon signs that turned night into day. Its face changed from day to day.
Among other things, the Berlin cigarette company Manoli advertised with a ring of neon tubes that constantly circled around a black ball. The proverbial "Berlin tempo" of those years was then characterized as "total manoli" (see Berlin Dictionary). The writer Kurt Tucholsky wrote a poem, and the composer Rudolf Nelson turned it into the legendary revue Total manoli with the dancer Lucie Berber. The writer Alfred Döblin used the square as the name for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Walter Ruttmann shot his film Berlin - Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin - The Symphony of the Big City) at Alexanderplatz in 1927. The square was soon "bursting at the seams".
In connection with the impending collapse of individual traffic at Alexanderplatz, the then city councillor for construction, Martin Wagner, proposed a redesign of the area at the end of the 1920s. The square was to be adapted to the traffic and the buildings were to be architecturally uniform. Wagner drafted a plan in 1929 in which the square was to be redesigned into a roundabout with a diameter of 100 metres. The design also called for twelve-meter-wide streets with ten-meter-wide sidewalks. Seven-storey buildings were to be built around this roundabout.
Neue Königstraße and Landsberger Straße, which flowed into the square from the northeast, were to be covered by buildings with two-story-high passageways. In this way, Wagner wanted the square to be architecturally closed. A new façade was planned for the Tietz department store in the northwest of the square.
According to Wagner's specifications, a limited architectural competition was launched in which five Berlin and one Cologne architects' office were allowed to participate. In addition to the winning design by the office of Hans and Wassili Luckhardt with Alfons Anker, Peter Behrens, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Paul Mebes, Johann Emil Schaudt and Heinrich Müller-Erkelenz also took part in the competition. The decision was made on February 5, 1929. Mies van der Rohe was the only architect who did not adhere to the specifications and came last in the competition.
Since not enough private investors could be found to implement Luckhardt's plan, the Berlin magistrate returned to Behrens' design, although he had only won second place in the architectural competition. Behrens had envisaged an oval shape (length 97 metres, width 63 metres), greened with lawn and enclosed by a privet hedge, around which buildings were to be erected in a horseshoe shape.
By the early 1930s, two of the buildings planned by Peter Behrens had been erected parallel to the Stadtbahn: the Alexanderhaus and the Berolinahaus. For this purpose, Aschinger and the former Königstädtisches Theater had to be demolished, as well as the row of houses along the Stadtbahn, including the house with the 99 sheep's heads. The new roundabout took in six streets. The 7.5-metre-high Berolina figure, which had to make way for the construction of the new underground crossing station in 1925, was repositioned in front of the Alexanderhaus in 1934.
But even Behrens' design could not be fully implemented, as the majority of the land was private property and the purchase price for the plots was a massive 20 million marks (adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency: around 91.07 million euros). The US consortium that had the Alexander and Berolina Houses built had no money for further buildings after the Great Depression, and no other investors were found either. There were also no new buildings at Alexanderplatz during the National Socialist era. The planning documents for the Behrens buildings bordering to the north were found a few years ago in a locked room in the bunker at the Gesundbrunnen subway station.
In 1936, when Berlin hosted the Summer Olympics, the traffic volume at this junction was particularly high, with a traffic count showing 35,000 vehicles between 7am and 9pm. The Alex was thus the busiest place in Berlin at the time.
Destruction of the square and surrounding buildings (1940-1945)
One of the largest air-raid shelters in the city during the Second World War was the underground bunker under Alexanderplatz. It was built between 1941 and 1943 by the Philipp Holzmann company on behalf of the Deutsche Reichsbahn.
The hostilities reached Alexanderplatz in early April 1945. The Berolina statue had already been removed in 1944 and presumably melted down for armament purposes. During the Battle of Berlin, Red Army artillery also shelled the city quarters around Alexanderplatz. The fighting of the last days of the war destroyed considerable parts of the Königsvorstadt as well as many of the buildings around Alexanderplatz. The Wehrmacht had entrenched itself in the tunnels of the underground. A few hours before the cessation of hostilities in Berlin, on May 2, 1945, troops of the SS blew up the north-south tunnel of the S-Bahn under the Landwehr Canal in order to impede the advance of the Red Army into downtown Berlin. The entire tunnel was flooded, and via a connecting passage at the Friedrichstraße subway station, large parts of the subway network were flooded as well (see: Berlin Subway/History: The Subway Under Water). Many people who had sought shelter in the tunnels lost their lives. Of the 63.3 kilometres of tunnels on the U-Bahn at the time, around 19.8 kilometres were flooded by over a million cubic metres of water.
Debris removal and reconstruction (1945-1964)
Before a planned reconstruction of the entire Alexanderplatz could take place, the war ruins were cleared away in mass actions. The area of the square advanced to a popular black market for barter transactions of small people but also for whole racketeering rings. The police made several daily raids to curb this illegal trading activity.
The reconstruction planning of Berlin's inner city area after the lost war was marked by a new beginning under the premise of giving more space to the rapidly growing motor vehicle traffic on the inner city thoroughfares. This idea of a car-friendly city went back to Hilbersheimer's and Le Corbusier's ideas and drawing board plans from the 1930s. Hans Scharoun's collective plan of 1946 therefore envisaged large-scale demolitions to make room for wide street aisles of the planned ribbon city along the Landwehr Canal. The division of Berlin and the worsening housing problem prevented the consistent implementation of this radical planning approach. The basis for the reconstruction in the eastern part of Berlin became the 16 principles of urban development of 27 July 1950 and the resulting principles for the redesign of Berlin's inner city of 23 August 1950. On 6 September 1950, the East Berlin magistrate passed the reconstruction law.
The principles for the redesign of Berlin's inner city envisaged a 90-metre-wide street from the east via Alexanderplatz to Unter denLinden. The implementation began in 1951 in the Stalinallee. In place of the destroyed residential and commercial buildings, new buildings were erected in prefabricated slab construction.
The ruins of the teachers' association house at Alexanderstrasse 41, which had been destroyed in the war, were removed and replaced in 1961-1964 by the teachers' house with the adjoining congress hall.
Idea of a "socialist" square (1964-1989)
In 1958, the V. Party Congress of the SED had decided to draw the then Stalinallee as the eastern axis of Berlin - in contrast to the former Große Frankfurter Straße, which was connected to the square via Schillingstraße - in a straight line to the Alex. In the spring of 1964, the city council announced a competition for the redesign of Alexanderplatz. Six architectural collectives were allowed to participate. The winner of the competition was the design by Schweizer, Tscheschner and Schulz from the city's building department. According to this plan, the square was to be completely freed from flowing traffic and the streets were to be routed tangentially past it. Another two road openings in the form of traffic spans were planned:
- Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, which runs past the square to the west and connects Prenzlauer Allee, which flows into it from the north, to the central street Unter den Linden and
- Grunerstrasse with a car tunnel as a connection between Leipziger Strasse and Otto-Braun-/Greifswalder Strasse in the southeast of Alexanderplatz.
The adjacent Rathausstraße to the south should also be redesigned as a pedestrian zone. The overlap of pedestrian and vehicular traffic was to be disentangled by the creation of spacious underground 'walkways'; this was intended to improve the quality of stay on Alexanderplatz. In the gradual realisation of these plans, the square was disconnected from its original urban setting. The demolition of further buildings and the relocation of the streets created an oversized square area. For the construction of the street tunnel in 1968, the rebuildable ruin of the Georgenkirche and the Minolhaus, built in the early 1930s in the style of New Objectivity and repaired after minor war damage, were demolished; for the widening of Grunerstrasse, the ruins of the refectory of the Grey Monastery and a wing of the Berlin Municipal Court, which were intended for reconstruction, were demolished.
In 1966, a traffic census showed that at peak times 10,000 people used the underground and suburban railway stations at Alexanderplatz. 3,600 cars, 136 trams and 60 buses crossed the square every hour, plus 26,000 pedestrians. In March 1966, the implementation of the new construction plan for Alexanderplatz began on the basis of the architectural competition. 34 houses were demolished; 550 families and 67 commercial properties had to move. In 1967, all tram lines were removed from the square and routed elsewhere. On the morning of January 2, 1967, at about 4:30 a.m., a Line 69 tram was the last to cross the square oval. On the northwestern side of the square, the Centrum department store and the 120-meter-high Interhotel Stadt Berlin were built by 1969. In the same time on the north side the house of the Berlin publishing house, the ten-storey house of the electrical industry, the house of the statistics (1970) and the seventeen-storey house of the travelling (1971) were established. In 1969 the square was redesigned: Walter Womacka's Fountain of Friendship between Peoples and Erich John's Urania World Time Clock now adorned the area. They soon became meeting places for Berliners and tourists. Thus, the structural setting and redesign of Alexanderplatz in the sense of socialist urban planning was completed. The square area was 80,000 square metres, more than four times the size it had been before the Second World War (18,000 square metres). The wide streets surrounding it separated Alexanderplatz from the neighbouring residential quarters.
The planning and conceptual design followed the example of Moscow. Similar to Red Square, Alexanderplatz was planned as a central rallying point for large-scale events. The 125-meter-wide street of Karl-Marx-Allee served as a parade ground for the annual parades of the National People's Army as part of the celebration of the founding of the GDR. Alexanderplatz is considered an example of ideologically influenced architecture in the German Democratic Republic. The television tower was a landmark visible from afar and became an East Berlin landmark.
Since the 1950s, art competitions have been held regularly at the Alexanderplatz underground station (Line 2). After 1990, BVG continued this tradition and, together with the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (NGBK), successfully organized thematic art exhibitions on the wall-side advertising spaces of the underground station.
After its completion in 1971, it was initially major events that brought the square to life, such as the X. World Youth Festival in the summer of 1973, the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the GDR in October 1974, or the festivities for the 30th anniversary of the end of the war in 1975. The square gradually developed into the center of East Berlin.
On 4 November 1989, a Saturday, the Alexanderplatz demonstration took place on the square, one of the largest demonstrations in Berlin's history. It is considered a milestone of the peaceful revolution in the GDR. Five days after this gathering, broadcast live on GDR television, the Berlin Wall fell.
Planning, redevelopment and redesign after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1990-2004)
After the political turnaround, the socialist urban planning and architecture of the 1970s no longer corresponded to the ideas of an inner-city square situation. Investors demanded planning security for their building projects. The first discussions with the interested public quickly led to the goal of reconnecting Alexanderplatz to the tram network and better linking it to the surrounding city quarters. In 1993, therefore, an urban planning ideas competition was held for architects to redesign the square and its immediate surroundings. In the first phase there were 16 entries, of which five were selected in April 1993 for the second phase of the competition. These five architects had to adapt their plans to detailed requirements. For example, the return of the tram to the Alex was now planned, and the implementation of the plans in several stages had to be made possible. The winner, chosen on 17 September 1993, was the Berlin architect Hans Kollhoff, who, based on the Behrens design, envisaged a horseshoe-shaped seven- to eight-storey development with 150-metre-high towers with 42 storeys on the outside. The Alexanderhaus and the Berolinahaus - both listed buildings - form the south-western boundary. Second place went to the design by Daniel Libeskind and Bernd Faskel. The proposal of the architectural firm Kny & Weber, which was strongly oriented towards Wagner's horseshoe shape, finally won third place. Kollhoff's design was adopted by the Berlin Senate on 7 June 1994 as the basis for the further redevelopment of the Alex and is known as the Kollhoff Plan.
In 1995, first the Landesbank Berlin completed the redevelopment of the Alexanderhaus. In 1998, the first tram ran over Alexanderplatz again, and in 1999, the urban development contracts for the implementation of Kollhoff and Timmermann's plans were signed with the property owners and the investors. On April 2, 2000, the Senate finally wrote down the development plan for Alexanderplatz. The purchase agreements between investors and the Senate Department for Urban Development were signed by both sides on May 23, 2002, thus laying the foundations for the redevelopment. The implementation took place in small steps, the planned high-rise buildings were still a long way off because hardly any investors were found.
Building boom and square redesign (since 2004)
The conversion of the Centrum department store began in 2004 by the Berlin architects Josef Paul Kleihues and his son Jan Kleihues. Since reunification it has been operated as Galeria Kaufhof, the typical aluminium curtain wall was removed and sold in parts. The building was enlarged by around 25 metres towards the square. From 2005 to 2006, the Berolinahaus was renovated and has since housed a branch of the C&A clothing chain.
In 2005, BVG began work on the extension of the tram line from Prenzlauer Allee to Alexanderplatz (Alex II). According to initial plans, this line was to be opened as early as 2000, but was postponed several times. After further delays due to a construction stop for the 2006 Football World Cup, BVG started operations on this line on 30 May 2007.
The renovation of Berlin's largest underground station, which was completed in October 2008, had been underway since the mid-1990s.
The redesign of the accessible square area began in February 2006. The redesign plans were provided by the architectural firm Gerkan, Marg und Partner and the Hamburg-based firm WES-Landschaftsarchitekten, which had emerged from a design competition announced by the state of Berlin in 2004. However, the paving work was interrupted just a few months after the start of construction for the duration of the 2006 Football World Cup and all the construction pits were provisionally asphalted. The construction work could not be completed until the end of 2007. The square received a paving of yellow granite, bordered at the edge around the buildings with grey mosaic paving. Around the Fountain of Friendship of the Peoples distance steps were built because of the square's slope, around the subway entrances benches were installed. In this context, Wall AG has modernised the underground toilet block dating back to the 1920s at a cost of about EUR 750,000. The total costs of the square redesign are said to have amounted to 8.7 million euros.
On September 12, 2007, the Alexa shopping center opened, located in the immediate vicinity of the square on the site of the old Berlin police headquarters. With 56,200 m² of retail space, it is one of the largest shopping centers in Berlin.
In May 2007, the Texan property development company Hines began construction of a six-storey commercial building called die mitte. The building was erected on a 3900 m² plot of land that, according to Kollhoff's plans, closes off the square to the east and thus reduces the square area. The commercial building was opened on 25 March 2009.
At the beginning of 2007, the construction company Wöhr + Bauer built an underground car park with three levels under Alexanderstraße between the hotel high-rise and the House of the Electrical Industry, which cost 25 million euros and offers space for around 700 cars. The opening took place on 26 November 2010. At the same time, the Senate narrowed the road from its former width of almost 100 metres to 58 metres, reducing it to three lanes in each direction. The costs for this amounted to 9.7 million euros.
Behind Alexanderplatz station, next to the Cubix cinema and in the immediate vicinity of the TV tower, the approximately 30-metre-high Alea 101 residential and commercial building was constructed in 2012-2014.
The Alexanderplatz area is the largest crime hotspot in Berlin. As of October 2017, Alexanderplatz is classified as a crime-ridden location under Berlin's General Security and Public Order Act.
Future of the square
In the long term, the demolition of the 125-metre high former Interhotel Hotel Stadt Berlin (today: Hotel Park-Inn) and the construction of three high-rise buildings on this site is planned. Whether and when this will be implemented is unclear, especially since the hotel high-rise slated for demolition only received a new facade in 2005 and the hotel's occupancy rate is very good. However, according to plans, the hotel's foot conversion will make way for the planned 35-metre high new block conversion in the next few years. The previous main tenant of the base development Saturn moved into the mitte in March 2009, and Primark opened a store here in the course of 2014.
The state of Berlin has announced that it will not enforce urban development contracts for the construction of planned high-rise buildings against the market. Of the 13 high-rise buildings once planned, ten remain after modifications to the plans, and building rights already exist for eight. The investors in the Alexa shopping centre have announced several times since 2007 that they want to sell their corresponding part of the site to an investor who is to build the high-rise. Until 2010, however, there were no signs that an investor had been found.
The first concrete high-rise plans are at Hines, the investor of die mitte. Since 2009, the construction of a new 150-metre-high tower behind the Handelshaus has been announced; on 12 September 2011, a slightly modified development plan was presented, which envisages a residential high-rise with 400 apartments; at the beginning of 2013, the development plan was put on public display. Following an architectural competition won by US architect Frank Gehry, construction on the 39-storey residential tower is scheduled to begin in 2017, with a hotel occupying the lower nine floors. The opening is planned for 2019[out of date].
In the fall of 2015, the Berlin Senate organized two forums in which interested citizens could voice their opinions on the changes to be made to the square. Architects, urban planners and senate officials discussed in public. On this occasion, however, it was reiterated that the plans for a development with high-rise buildings were not up for discussion. According to the master plan by architect Hans Kollhoff, up to eleven huge buildings are still to be built, with a mixture of shops and apartments.
At the beginning of March 2018, it was announced that the Mitte district authority had granted planning permission for the first high-rise residential building, the Alexander Tower, which is approximately 150 metres high. On 29 of 35 floors, 377 apartments are to be built directly next to the Alexa shopping centre by the planned completion in 2023. Construction began on November 27, 2019.
For another tower on the square, which is to be around 150 meters high and was planned by Development Covivio Germany as a mixed residential and commercial building between Primark and the subway access directly on Alexanderplatz, archaeological investigations of the underground took place in 2019. On this area, scientists found remains of the drill hall, grave fields with skeletal parts; it was filled in again on November 18. The developer is considering making the archaeologists' findings visible in his tower construction, for example by referring to the Alexhalle. New excavation fields next to the Park Inn will follow. According to old plans, this was the site of the Grand Hôtel Alexanderplatz, which opened in 1884 and was completely destroyed by a bomb in 1943. The archaeologists are looking forward to new interesting finds.
