Like most of Berlin, our adopted neighborhood of Moabit has its share of signs ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime, including many that have outlived the stores whose names they bear. This far-from-complete roundup features some of the neighborhood’s most colorful signage.
Lying at the northern border of Berlin’s Moabit district, just south of the Westhafenkanal on the U9 line, is U-Bahnhof Westhafen. In a city with so many strikingly varied train stations, Westhafen nonetheless stands as one of the most beautiful and unique: since 2000, the entire station has been home to a massive text-based art installation by artists Francoise Schein and Barbara Reiter, under the auspices of the multi-country Inscrire project.
Westhafen is one of 27 stops on the Ringbahn, which means it’s both a U-Bahn and S-Bahn station—but with the latter being a standard, ground-level outdoor station, the texts are limited just to the U-Bahn (i.e. underground) part of the complex and its connecting passages.
