The runways
Two kilometres of asphalt for cycling and skating.
Coooohen — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, United States — CC BY 2.0 · Avda — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Gregory Varnum — CC BY-SA 4.0
When the Soviet Union cut every land route into West Berlin in 1948 to force its surrender, the Western powers responded by flying in everything the city needed — food, fuel, coal — through Tempelhof and two other airports. It ran for about eleven months across more than two hundred thousand flights, with aircraft landing every three minutes at its peak, until the blockade was lifted.
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Tempelhofer Feld is a former airport turned into the largest open public space inside any city in the world: three hundred and fifty-five hectares of flat ground in the middle of Berlin, with two asphalt runways two kilometres long still exactly where the aircraft left them. Its history is heavy. The vast curved terminal was raised by the Nazi regime in the 1930s as one of the largest buildings on earth, and the airport then became West Berlin's only lifeline during the Soviet blockade of 1948-49, when Western supply aircraft landed every few minutes around the clock for months — the Berlin Airlift that kept two million people alive. The airport closed in 2008, and when the government proposed building housing around its edges, Berliners rejected it in a 2014 referendum by a decisive margin and forced the field to stay empty as it was. Today people skate, cycle and fly kites on the runways themselves — a strange spatial experience with no equivalent in any other city.
Two kilometres of asphalt for cycling and skating.
A vast 1930s monument on the northern edge.
Tempelhofer Damm, 12101 Berlin