Potsdamer Platz

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(see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdamer_Platz)

 Potsdamer Platz 

Located in the geographical heart of the city, at the intersection of five major thoroughfares, this is perhaps the city's most iconic single locale - the Piccadilly Circus or Times Square of Berlin, if you will. The traffic is nonstop; the Platz is said to be one of the first places in the world where traffic lights were installed. In its very center stands an instantly recognizable control tower where a solitary policeman manually switches lights, monitoring traffic from on high.

Potsdamer Platz and the adjacent Leipziger Platz are homes to shopping venues, restaurants, hotels, and cafes. Just west of the square may be found a number for former foreign embassies (the so-called "Millionaire's Quarter"); many now converted into multi-unit rentals. In the early part of the 1920's, the most prominent hotel in the area is the Hotel Furstenhof, situated directly on the Platz, with its neo-Baroque, proto-Art Nouveau architecture.

The massive Wertheim department store towers over the plaza, offering thousands of square feet of consumerist bliss and, with its own bank, theatre, restaurants, laundry, and gardens, is practically a city unto itself.

The Haus Potsdam (after 1928, the Haus Vaterland) is the greatest pleasure palace in the city, encompassing a massive cinema, a grand cafe (the largest in the world), and a number of restaurants, each themed around a particular cuisine of the world. The locale's slogan is "die Welt in einem Haus" ("the world in one house").

Unlike other major city centers, Potsdamer Platz is relatively free of evident vice. The upper-class neighborhoods around the site would never permit it, at least not overtly. Yet, it is said, many are the seemingly innocuous residences and storefronts that are in actuality covers for high-end brothels and scandalous underage prostitution rings (the so-called "Pharmacies").

The busiest train station in the city is the Potsdamer Bahnhof, its facade fronting directly onto the square. The main station plus its two wings services both long-haul trains from Paris, Strasbourg, and other points west, as well as the suburban Ringbahn and the Wannsee lines that take Berliners out to the lush woods and sparkling lakes of the western Havelland.

A half-mile (800 m) south of Potsdamer Platz proper sits the great brick-and-glass monument to industry, known as Anhalter Bahnhof; the "Gateway to the South", this is one of Berlin's five principle train stations and is the largest and grandest station not just in Berlin, but in all of Germany. Completed in 1880, the 100-foot-high (30.5 m) steel and glass roof encompasses six station platforms that accommodate up to 40,000 travelers per day aboard trains that arrive and depart every five minutes. The station's lines service Munich, Frankfurt-aim-Main, Dresden, Vienna, Rome, Athens, and other southerly destinations.

After 1929, travelers arriving via the Anhalter station may take a 300 foot (90 m) long underground tunnel (complete with its own shops) connecting to the Hotel Excelsior, the latest crown jewel of Berlin's high-end hotels. Expanded over the 1920's from a failing 200-room facility, by 1930 the Excelsior sprawls over 81,000 square feet (more than 7,525 square meters) and 600 rooms, nine restaurants, and a library, making it the largest hotel in Europe at the time. The hotel maintains its own bakery and butcher shop, and its newsstand stocks 200 daily papers from Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere.