Tempelhof to become an enormous city park - Berlin

The airfield of Berlin's historic Tempelhof airport will become the German capital's largest park by summer of 2010, city officials announced on Monday.

"Beginning in May the Tempelhof field will be open to all," Berlin's urban development Senator Ingeborg Junge-Reyer said.

With an area of 230 hectares, the airfield park that straddles both the Kreuzberg and Neukölln districts will be significantly larger than Berlin's famous Tiergarten park.

As of Tuesday, Berlin will be sole owner of the park after purchasing the federal government's share for €35 million, Junge-Reyer said. The city plans to spend a further €60 million over the next seven years to develop the open space. Another €1.6 million per year will go to park maintenance and security.

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i think that is AWESOME. The only thing I love more than enormous city parks are enormous city parks with history.

More public land for Berliners to completely trash.

Good news. Although to be blunt, there wasn't much else they could actually do with that vast area of land.

Hope people remember its history, just heard today that a pilot I worked with that used to tell the stories of the Berlin airlift was buried today .... glad I had the joy of knowing and hearing him recount!

I'm inclined to be a little skeptical,I hope it retains it's character,keep the runways ect.I think an free open air city museum would be besser.A purpose built park sounds a bit shady (NPI).

Isn't that the whole point planting of trees in it? LOL.

What are they going to do with the building? If they just let squatters come in and let the whole thing fall apart, that would be sad. even a fucking shopping mall would be better than that. But a museum or a library, or even an institution of higher education would be good.

I'm sure the entire terminal building is a listed structure and it will be preserved as part of any plan. Tempelhof is important not just in a Berlin context, but also a world one.

Parks can be enclosed too,without the need to plant trees or landscape one per se.

That much space will be able to support a huge number of drug dealers

The Nazis always planned that Tempelhof would always be converted into a huge park... seems the original intent has a way of coming back around... good that not the originators of the idea are still around ;-)

There are two issues IMO with turning Templehof into a park;it would be just another park in a city with an abundance of green spaces(which is great)and more significantly it would be a park a just bit too far from Mitte to be of use to most Berliners/sims.Instead I would see,like a previous poster said,it being used as a playground for drugs and smashed bottles.I saw on the news clip the U-bahn on Monday night,it was referred to as "luxus park".My German is not strong enough to understand the context of luxury park,is it a fancy way of saying a new park?

Bravo! I always thought to myself, they have an opportunity to make something like Central Park in New York here. It will improve the quality of life in Berlin immensely.

Re - Central park in NYC v/s Berlin - I think we already have one, called the Tiergarten.

Re - Templehof's new park - I love love love the idea. I think that properly done, it can use the runways as walking paths, interspurse the areas for people to relax, children to play, and maybe a running / biking path around the outside and it will be an invaluable addition to the local area - including allowing for property values of those buildings nearby to go up (nothing kills those like an airport, let me tell you!). Drug dealers and smashed bottle dissenters aside (we have those in every park, I"m afraid) I can totally see this as a positive thing for the south side of the city. I can hardly wait to use it!