Somewhere along the side of the road, something yellow blooms…

The main bank building from the “rear” on Mülheim’s Berliner Platz – it looks comparatively small from this angle, but the inside is positively huge. Not being a Sparkasse customer, I haven’t been in there very often – but the main hall is a giant marble extravaganza. The whole complex was only built at the end of the 1980s after the square had been only a parking space for more than a decade. The Berliner Platz had once been the site of another one of Mülheim’s shopping disasters – in 1968 Neckermann had built a huge, eleven-storey department store at this location, which completely loomed over the city like the highrises at the other end of the inner city do today. The Neckermann store lasted only ten years – in 1978 it was closed again, mainly because the shopping center on the opposite end of the Schloßstraße and Leineweberstraße had been too much competition. The building itself was demolished in 1980 and the Sparkasse had already bought the real estate by this time, but it took until 1989 to build the new banking complex, which is actually quite modest in size compared to the Neckermann giant. Before, there had also been a church in the vicinity, the 19th century Paulikirche, which had been completely demolished in 1971.

There’s no use denying it: winter is arriving fast and the trees know it!

This was only about four weeks ago… now it’s all bare branches.

From early October – I feel like it should know what this is, but I have no idea! :-)

Part of the Sparkasse bank building on Mülheim’s Berliner Platz – they definitively have some sort of greek or roman thing going on in the architecture, it almost looks like a money temple! This is basically the reverse view of the previous photo, you can see the same strange fountain here (I have no idea what this sculpture symbolizes!). More about the history of the place in the last photo tomorrow! This is, again, a very old photo from 2003 which I found rummaging around in the archives.

The cactus flowers are all petals, all the time :-).

Almost leafless in mid-November…

Wallflowers – literally! :-)

This is part of the front view of the residential buildings on Mülheim’s Berliner Platz. There is actually still a fairly large pedestrian square with a fountain in the middle between this building and the bank, which is behind me in this photo. The whole complex would not look much different in colour because it’s basically grey, but it’s certainly not the worst architecture this city has ever seen. This photo is again from 2003, but it does not look much different today save for the trees which have grown a bit.