History
Our street portrait shows a section of the north side of Rigaer Straße in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain. It runs in an east-west direction parallel to Frankfurter Allee to the south. It was named after Riga, the capital of Latvia, in 1893. It is mainly characterised by historical buildings from the turn of the 20th century, supplemented by new buildings such as the prefabricated slab building on the right edge of the picture (see complete panorama under the detailed pictures). The complete street block lies between Liebigstrasse on the left and Zellestrasse on the right.
Squatter scene
In the panorama we see a number of plainly plastered old buildings with conspicuous banners and graffiti. Especially Rigaer Strasse 94 in the centre of the picture is a symbol of Berlin’s squatter scene (Hausbesetzerszene). Originally, a whole series of houses were occupied by the Berlin squatter movement around 1990. Some of them became legal tenancies, in others pubs and event spaces were built. In the meantime, most of the squatted houses have been vacated. Only in Rigaer 94 are there still partial occupations that continue until today (2022). For years, a battle has been raging between the left-wing scene, the owners, the courts and the police as intermediaries for the preservation of the squatted buildings.
