"'It's a legendary place,' says Petra Schulters, standing on one of the station's platforms recently with her daughter. 'If Berlin is mentioned together with a train station, then it's Zoo Station.'
Though missing the majesty of New York's Grand Central Station or astounding passenger turnover of Tokyo's Shinjuku Station, Zoo has crafted its own powerful story. Spectators to the 1936 Olympic Games got their first glimpse of the city through the large windows of the station. Visitors from Paris and Basel passed through the train station on their way to Stockholm, Warsaw, or Moscow.In the early 1980s it became synonymous with the packs of teenage drug addicts who hung around the station, their story immortalized in the book and movie 'Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo.' Following reunification, the Irish rock band U2 paid tribute to Zoo Station with an eponymous song on their 1991 album 'Achtung Baby.'
Though rail officials ordered a renovation of the station in the 1990s and promised city planners to keep it on the long-distance grid, construction of the main train station near the heart of reunified Berlin marked the beginning of the end.
'Every generation creates something new and as a result something in the old generation needs to fade away,' says Laurenz Demps, a former professor of city history at Berlin's Humboldt University.
Or, as U2 put it:
Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you standing in the station
Your face pressed up against the glass."
First the Joshua Tree collapses and now this...