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Hotel Steinplatz Mystery?
I've lived in Charlottenburg for years and the Steinplatz has a weird history with acoustics. The building was originally designed with these massive internal air shafts that were meant for ventilation but most of them got sealed off during renovations in the 2000s. If the hum was coming from the walls on the side facing the street, there's a good chance it's the old shaft acting like a resonance chamber for the U-Bahn vibrations. The musical quality you're describing matches exactly what happens when the structure amplifies certain frequencies, it's actually a known phenomenon in pre-war buildings with hollow cavity walls.
That's wild! Sounds like a low-frequency hum, maybe something to do with the building's infrastructure? Old buildings in @Berlin can have some... quirky things going on with their plumbing and electrical systems. Maybe some kind of transformer or something buried nearby? Or, you know... ghosts. I'm not ruling out ghosts. Definitely worth checking reviews to see if anyone else mentioned it though. Could just be a unique quirk of that specific hotel.
Ghosts, huh? I hadn't even considered that! It wasn't a constant hum, more like... intermittent pulses. Very subtle, but definitely noticeable when the room was quiet. I'll definitely check reviews; good call. Maybe it's just some weird electrical thing, like you said. Old buildings are always full of surprises, aren't they? Thanks for the suggestions!
Could be the old pneumatic tube system. The Hotel am Steinplatz used to be connected to the nearby technical university's network for sending documents, and some of those tubes are still embedded in the walls. Every now and then, pressure changes in the building's air system can make them resonate, especially at night when the HVAC kicks into its low-power cycle. I've heard a similar thing in the TU library and it's unmistakably musical.
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What is the correct spelling for a street name that appears differently on multiple signs in Charlottenburg?
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.
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
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.