ERLIN — What makes the soul of a city?
Could it be a giant swimming hole?
A proposal under consideration here called the Flussbad (“river pool”) would clean up a filthy canal, part of the River Spree, that flows around thetourist-mobbed Museum Island. The plan would add new wetlands and some place the public can literally dive into.
Despite detractors who picture Berlin’s cultural center being upstaged by the equivalent of one long, riotous water-filled bouncy castle, the idea, which has been around for a while, is gaining momentum. A coalition of conservative and Green politicians, architects, environmentalists and others are rallying behind it. And this summer, to promote the Flussbad, swimmers were invited to brave the polluted water. (Yes, some spent days recovering in bed.)
Tim Edler and his brother, Jan, run a design firm here called Realities: United. The two of them began imagining the Flussbad in the late 1990s. They envisioned a sandy bottom and new plantings filtering the water and providing a refuge for wildlife, with a stretch in front of the museums where anybody could take a dip. Tim gave me a tour one recent afternoon.
The canal is partly lined with East German-era apartment towers and government ministries. Cranes hover on the skyline above half-built luxury condos targeted at foreign investors. Not long ago Berlin advertised itself as poor but sexy; now rapid gentrification has contributed to an identity crisis, partly symbolized by the fake Baroque palace under construction in the middle of Museum Island. A behemoth of weird, Prussian nostalgia, it mimics the shell of the gloomy Hohenzollern Stadtschloss that communist East Germans tore down on the site in 1950 — and vies to become the most conspicuous new work of architecture in the capital.
Belle Époque Paris had the Eiffel Tower; Art Deco New York, the Empire State Building. Frank Gehry’s design for the Guggenheim Museum gave Bilbao, Spain, a once rusty backwater, a shiny symbol of its modern identity. What will it be here for early 21st-century Berlin: a cardboard Schloss or the whimsical, environmentally friendly Flussbad-for-the-people?
The other day I walked part of the 606, Chicago’s down-home twist on the chic High Line in New York: a 2.7-mile elevated park along a derelict freight track, wending east-west across a mix of industrial and residential areas. What I saw wasn’t sleek or even especially beautiful, with plantings that need time to grow, a little too much concrete and tall steel fencing.
But it connects ground-level neighborhood parks and belongs to a larger, humanizing campaign by Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, to green up gritty areas of the city. Young mothers push strollers; elderly couples walk arm in arm; joggers and speeding bicyclists hog the pathways. Rough, ready, community-friendly, the 606 speaks to Chicago’s heart.
The Flussbad speaks to a tradition here; there are other urban Flussbads in this part of the world, so the idea has local resonance. Gottfried Ludewig is a young member of the Berlin City Parliament from the center-right Christian Democratic Union, Angela Merkel’s party. He has become one of the project’s most vocal champions, enlisting political allies across the aisle, corralling money for a feasibility study and promoting a grass-roots, community-based campaign.
Neither he nor Tim Edler would divulge the project’s projected cost, which must be many, many millions of dollars. But both said the major hurdle would not be money. The real struggle is over civic identity.
“Urban development and politics here should be like music in the city, where you have both the Philharmonic and nightclubs like Berghain,” Mr. Ludewig argued. “We should have Museum Island and also the Flussbad to show we’re still a city where crazy ideas can become reality.”
Opponents of the Flussbad fume about the prospect of bikini-clad bathers despoiling a noble site. But the real embarrassment is the dirty canal. Architectural preservationists fret that stairways cut into the canal’s retaining walls will tamper with a World Heritage Site, altering the work of a cultural hero, the neo-Classical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who conceived the museum quarter. But the walls have been rebuilt untold times over the years, and a mess of lights, moorings and signs have been stuck onto them. They are hardly inviolable.
As for fears about noisy Berliners partying late into summer nights there, the Flussbad may require what Times Square’s pedestrian plazas do: more policing and sanitation.
But that’s the trade-off for making a more popular and accessible public space. It would be great if Berliners reclaimed a site that is now for tourists and dead at night.
It would be good for the city, too, to recuperate a long-abject waterway at its center, and keep faith with its post-Wall soul.
How do you say “cannonball!” in German?
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