Galeries Lafayette, 3x Galleria Kaufhof stores, Getir/Gorillas all leaving Berlin this year. Which other big institutions will be leaving this year?

fwiw the real estate people i know are watching the KaDeWe group like hawks. they already sold off the Oberpollinger in Munich and the Alsterhaus in Hamburg is supposedly next. if they trim Berlin, it'd be the KaDeWe itself downsizing floors, not closing entirely, but that would still be a huge shift for Tauentzien.

also don't sleep on the smaller closures. the Mauerpark flea market has been losing vendors for months because the city keeps raising the stall fees and the tourist crowds are way down. that place felt hollow last summer.

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You can add the Galeria at Ring-Center to the list. I walked through there last month and half the second floor was already cordoned off with those cheap white dividers. The center itself has been struggling since they lost the big Rewe and the DM moved out a couple years ago.

On a different note, I'm hearing that the Café Kranzler at the top of Ku'damm might finally close its doors for good. They've been running on nostalgia and tourist money for years, but the rent there is astronomical and the last renovation never really brought people back. If that goes, it's another piece of old West Berlin gone.

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honestly the bigger shakeup nobody's talking about is what's happening at Bierpinsel in Steglitz. that place has been a rotating door of failed concepts for years and i heard the current leaseholder is finally giving up. it's not a big chain but it's such a weird Berlin landmark that its closure would feel symbolic.

also keep an eye on the Karstadt at Kurfürstendamm. that building's been on life support since the Galeria group went under and the foot traffic there is pathetic compared to ten years ago. if they shut that one down it'd leave a massive hole in the Ku'damm shopping scene.

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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