Berlin, Hotel Stadt Berlin

This photo, looking east from the 1,209-foot-high TV tower, shows the 37-story Hotel Stadt Berlin, where our tour group stopped for rest-room duty in 1970. The expensive hotel looked incongruous when compared to the purported Communist life-style of the East Germans, in 1970.

When we visited Berlin in 1980 and 1991 we thought the hotel and the restaurants looked neat but still somewhat expensive, compared to other places we visited in this part of Berlin. It still looked far too fancy for the surroundings, but it would require craftsmanship to bring it up to the standards of first-class hotels a couple of miles west of here. We walked through the lobby of the hotel again in 1991 and were told the 880 rooms with WC (water closet, or toilet), telephone, and radio, rented for between $60 and $200 per night. In the years since we visited, reconstruction has continued in Berlin, and those room rates certainly have been re-evaluated.

However, the main reason for this photo is the tiny white spot at the lower edge of the photo, right in the center. There was a parking lot in the middle of Karl-Marx Allee (a very wide street), that white spot is the top of our RV.