A photo contrast of 50 years from Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm shows how one era’s progress becomes obsolete. The contrast also provides a trivia quiz question.

The top photograph is from the mid 1950s, and an old WCG publication praises the "newly constructed, modern glass and concrete tower [which] controls traffic at the busy intersection" where the Kurfüstendamm and the Joachimstaler streets meet. The traffic tower with a couple of policemen is in the right half of the picture. In the background, looking roughly from west to east, you can see the faint outline of the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church, which was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in the last years of World War II. There aren’t a lot of cars in the photo, and the main transportation visible is a streetcar. The fact that most people did not own their own cars at that time is evidenced by the long orderly line of people waiting to board the streetcar.

The bottom picture shows the same "traffic tower" today, which I photographed last September when Darris McNeely and I visited Berlin. The view is in the opposite direction, from east to west, and the traffic tower has long since been abandoned as an adequate means of controlling the flow of today’s city traffic. If I recall correctly, it wasn’t being used anymore in 1971 when I first visited Berlin. Beneath the abandoned tower you see a newsstand, called a "Kiosk" in German. Not visible in this photo is the Joachimstaler Straße, but if it were, you would see that the streetcar tracks have long been abandoned, and the traffic has increased quite a bit since the mid 1950s. You would also see that the view of the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church is nearly obscured by the many modern buildings that have been built since the 1950s.

Now, which WCG publication featured the upper photo? 🙂