In Berlin (all two or three of you?). Please sign this petition in support of the old baseball fields on Columbiadamm at Tempelhofer Feld (click the picture).
The Berlin Senat is planning to get rid of one of them to make room for a Friedhofserweiterung (cemetary expansion)? That about says it all, doesn’t it?
Thanks for the link, Indeterminacy. And yes, an ape may just have been keeping score there.
Ein weiterer Softballplatz in Zehlendorf wurde aufgrund zahlreichen Protestes eines Bewohners eines Einfamilienhauses vernichtet und steht ebenfalls nicht mehr zur Verfügung.
I dunno. I still like that Tempelhof mountain thingy plan the best.
Tempelhof, whose stone-clad terminal built by the Nazis in the 1930s, was closed to air traffic in 2008 and its main building is used for events including an annual beer festival. The airfield, which has two runways, has been turned into parkland where visitors jog, roller-blade on the tarmac and barbecue.
Although it’s about the same size. Tempelhof was a pretty cool airport though.
But the bulldozers aren’t finished with Tempelhof just yet. Starting in 2013, the new park will undergo a four-year, 60-million-euro ($48 million) facelift to become the home of the 2017 International Garden Exhibition. By then, it should look a lot more like its storied New York counterpart.
Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit is becoming more like the Sun King all the time. After successfully campaigning to close the city’s famed Tempelhof Airport on grounds of nonprofitablitly, among other things, he has pushed through a rental contract with the Bread & Butter fashion tradeshow – Bread & Butter will use parts of the airport for two months a year over a period of five years, thus making it very difficult to find other renters – which appears to be anything but profitable itself. The maintenance costs to the city for the keeping the closed Airport “going” are much higher, you see.
But we may never know for sure just how bad a deal it is as the mayor refuses to disclose any details to anyone who asks him, the three opposition parties in the Rotes Rathaus included. I know what you’re thinking, but Rotes Rathaus doesn’t mean red rat house, its Berlin’s city hall and happens to be made out of red brick. Although, these days…
There’s a certain arrogance about Wowereit that obviously never sat well with those who have voted against him, but this growing distance to his Untertanen (subjects) below is slowly beginning to bug his buddies on the left now, too. Not that this matters or anything. But still.
Observing Hermann 