Prenzlauer Tor
It was one of the 18 town gates in the Berlin city wall and stood at today’s Torstrasse on the corner of Prenzlauer Allee. The 4 metre high city wall was erected in 1735 as a customs boundary. The city wall and gate were completely worn out in 1869.
A road led from the town gate to the city of Prenzlau after which the gate was labelled. The bank before the gate was first called ‘Windmühlenberg’ (wind mill hill) because of the many wind mills that stood there till 1870 and later it was called Prenzlauer Berg. The wide view into Berlin and into the Spree valley attracted a lot of picnickers to come to the north in front of the city gates. In 1835 Theodor Würst built a beer garden on Windmühlenberg. Thanks to the high level of groundwater quality and the possibilities of constructing fermentation cellars the area became the biggest brewery-location of Berlin from 1840. In 1865 the brewery- and land owner family Bötzow founded another bar on the “Windmühlenberg” which in 1884 expanded into a beer garden with 5000 seats. On the land of the brewery (Saarbrücker Straße/ corner Prenzlauer Allee) the Bötzow family built themselves a nice villa. The Bötzow family donated the plot of land where in 1893, in the presence of the emperor, was inaugurated the Immanuel Church (Prenzlauer Allee/ corner Saarbrücker Straße). On the grounds of the brewery (Saarbrücker Straße / corner of Prenzlauer Allee), the family Bötzow built a magnificent villa, which was called by the Berlinersthe“Castle of the North”.Since 2013 the current ownerfrom Bötzow Berlin, the company Otto Bock, has realized here a complex restructuring plan.
In 1906 the Berlin Food Company Aschinger AG built its principle office on the corner Prenzlauer Allee/ Saarbrücker Straße. VEB Backkombinat Berlin until 1990, the “Backfabrik” accommodates modern Service- and Technology enterprises since 2002. The department store Jonas (Torstraße/ corner Prenzlauer Allee) was built in 1928/29. It was built with natural stone and disguised its 8 floor steel frame in the architectural tradition of the Bauhaus Dessau. In 1939 the house was overrun by the Nazis, from 1942 till the end of the War it was used by the youth organisation Hitlerjugend, and from 1946 it was used by the Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) the German socialist party. Till 1956 this was SED’s headquarters, it also became the SED-Institute for the Marxismus-Leninismus (IML). In 2010,the Soho House Berlin as a location of a luxurious international clubconceptopened its business in the building.