Alte Bäckerei
[Old bakery]
The courtyard where the old Hartmann bakery is located recalls Pankow’s rural origins.
Between 1875 and 1964 the Hartmann family ran this bakery, which was built in 1860 and later renovated, becoming a memorial in 2001. Today you will find here,a meeting place, the“Museum für Kindheitin Pankow”(childhood in Pankow) and a showplace of traditional handicrafts with the selling of bread and a guest apartment.
The Wollankstraße (Wollank street) street was named in 1883 after Adolf Friedrich Wollank (1833-1877), a head official from Pankow. This street also received other names before, like Prinzenweg or Prinzenstraße.
The family of the landowner possessed large estates to the north of Berlin. The Franciscan monastery of the Wollnakstraße 18-19 belongs since 1921 to the Franciscan Order, and it is the only monastery of the Silesia Province that has remained German. In the flats that where left after the collapse of the GDR the monks opened in 1991 a soup kitchen for the needy, where up to 500 people came to eat every day.
The Wollankstraße train station has a peculiarity since the construction of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961: it was located just between the zone borders, in East Berlin, and had an open access to the West side. The train station belonged to the West train net and it was closed for GDR citizens. In January 1962 an escape tunnel was discovered under the train station, which was built from the West side of the city during the first years after the construction of the wall.