Berlin’s building law required one yard 5.34 metres square. Riehmer built two private streets instead.

02He had to sue for it

The authorities resisted for years. Riehmer went to law, house by house

What he wanted did not fit the Bebauungsplan, the city’s street plan of 1862, which laid out the blocks of the new districts round the old city. Permission came one house at a time, and some of it only through the courts — which is why the complex took 19 years.

“Ihr geistiger Schöpfer und Bauherr Wilhelm Riehmer konnte die Anlage trotz dauerhaften Behördenwiderstands durchsetzen.”

Its intellectual creator and client Wilhelm Riehmer was able to push the complex through in the face of permanent resistance from the authorities.

Source: Landesdenkmalamt Berlin

03Three campaigns, 1880–1899

19 years, three building campaigns — and Riehmer drew none of them

The complex is one idea and three building campaigns, and Riehmer drew none of them himself. He was a Maurermeister and the client; the listing names the men who designed each phase. Building began at the far end, on Hagelberger Straße, and finished on Yorckstraße. The Landesdenkmalamt’s description dates the Großbeerenstraße houses to 1882–83; its own table gives two campaigns. Both are drawn.

04He was not the first

He did not invent the private street. He made the houses behind it as fine as the street

Riehmers Hofgarten is usually told as the invention of the private residential street in Berlin. The listing says otherwise, and names the two that came before it. And Riehmer had tried the idea himself: 12 years before the Hofgarten, in 1868, he built a house of a similar type at Mehringdamm 40.

Begasviertel, Tiergarten

Housing along a private street, built before Riehmers Hofgarten.

Source: Landesdenkmalamt Berlin

Heinelshof, Friedrichshain

The same, also before.

Source: Landesdenkmalamt Berlin

What was new here, then.

Not the private street. The scale of it, and the fact that the houses behind were finished to the standard normally reserved for the houses in front — which is what the listing says let him charge a high rent for a courtyard flat.

Source: Landesdenkmalamt Berlin

05After the war

Saved by public money, and protected — in 1964, or in 1953

The façades are repaired, in a campaign that only happened because of substantial public subsidy. On 4 August 1964 the complex was made a geschützter Baubereich, a protected building area; other accounts date its first protection to 1953. Both dates are shown below.

The flats are comprehensively modernised, some plans changed. A garden house largely destroyed in the war is replaced by a cinema in steel, glass and aluminium, and the historic garden layout is largely reinstated.

When the cinema went in is disputed: the Landesdenkmalamt places it in the early 1970s, other accounts in 1985/86. From the late 1990s the façades are repaired again, in stages.

Source: Landesdenkmalamt Berlin · other accounts

06Walk it

183 metres from Yorckstraße to Hagelberger Straße, on foot

7 photographs in the order you meet them, from the Yorckstraße pavement to the Hagelberger Straße pavement, each placed by how far in it was taken. The inner ground is open to the public in daylight.

1 · 0 m

2 · 0 m

3 · 15 m

4 · 50 m

5 · 80 m

6 · 110 m

7 · 183 m

07The record

What the record settles, and what it does not

Who lived here: Beamten, Offizieren, selbständigen Kaufleuten und einigen Akademikern und Künstlern — officials, officers, merchants trading on their own account, and some academics and artists. The listing describes the tenancy; it does not list it, and no source consulted places a named resident at this address.