Neukölln moves faster than the rest of Berlin, and you can measure it on a single street. Walk Weserstraße at night and the bars run from punk holes with sticky floors to careful little cocktail rooms with natural wine and a bouncer, sometimes two doors apart. That compression — the cheap and the polished pressed up against each other — is the whole story of the district. A decade or so ago north Neukölln was the byword for cheap-rent, immigrant, working-class Berlin. Now it’s the Kiez everyone has an opinion about, the place that functions as the city’s gentrification clock. The clock is running fast, and on the ground you can watch the hands move.

Getting there

The U8 line is the spine of north Neukölln. Schönleinstraße and Hermannplatz put you straight into the Reuterkiez — the dense residential quarter that holds the bar strip — and Hermannplatz doubles as a U7 interchange. Ride the U7 south from there and you hit Rathaus Neukölln, which is the stop for the famous rooftop, and then Karl-Marx-Straße, the district’s big commercial artery. For the old airport field, take the U8 down to Boddinstraße on the southern edge. It’s a well-connected district, and most of what you’ll want is walkable once you’re off the train.

The Reuterkiez and the Weserstraße strip

Start in the Reuterkiez, the warren of streets between the canal and Sonnenallee, and specifically on Weserstraße, which is the single densest bar street in this part of Berlin. It runs roughly between the U-Bahn stops at Schönleinstraße, Rathaus Neukölln and Hermannplatz, and along it you’ll find the full Neukölln range: dim, smoky dive bars that have been there for years, newer cocktail spots, craft-beer rooms, late-night Spätis selling cheap beer to drink on the curb. The texture is the point — this is a street where you bar-hop on foot, ducking in and out, and where the crowd skews young, international, and out very late.

Nearby on the water, the Maybachufer canal hosts the Türkenmarkt — the Turkish market — on Tuesdays and Fridays, a long, crowded run of produce, fabric, cheese, olives and street food along the Landwehrkanal. It’s one of the genuine pleasures of the district and a reminder of the immigrant Berlin that built it.

The rooftop on the mall

Berlin’s most beloved rooftop is, improbably, on top of a shopping-mall car park. Klunkerkranich sits on the upper deck of the Neukölln Arcaden parking garage at Karl-Marx-Straße 66 — take the U7 to Rathaus Neukölln, walk into the mall, find the car-park elevators, and ride to the top. What’s up there is a sprawling bohemian roof garden: planter boxes and a community garden, a sandpit for daytime families, a cantina, and a stage and DJ program that turns the place into a sunset-and-into-the-night scene. Admission is typically free before late afternoon and a small cover after; the view west over Berlin’s rooftops is the draw. It’s touristy now, yes — but it’s a genuinely Neukölln idea, art and beer and gardening stacked on top of municipal infrastructure, and it’s still worth the elevator ride.

Sonnenallee: the Arab high street

Cutting through the district is Sonnenallee, Neukölln’s Arab high street — sometimes nicknamed “Arab Street” — and one of the best places to eat in Berlin if you want it cheap, late, and excellent. The lower stretch runs to Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian bakeries, shawarma and falafel counters, knafeh and baklava shops, hookah cafés and Middle Eastern grocers, many open very late. This is where Berlin’s large Arab community, including a big wave of more recent Syrian arrivals, built a food economy that now feeds the whole city. Eat here. A late shawarma on Sonnenallee is one of the most reliably good meals in the district, and it costs almost nothing.

The field where an airport was

On the southern edge, Tempelhofer Feld is the decommissioned Tempelhof airport, the monumental Nazi-era terminal whose runways are now an enormous flat public park. Berliners cycle, skate, kite-surf on land-boards and picnic on the old taxiways; there are community gardens along the margins and almost no built structures, just sky. It’s free, it borders Neukölln’s Schillerkiez quarter, and on a clear day it’s one of the great open spaces in any European city. The fact that it stays un-built-on is itself a political landmark: in a 2014 referendum, Berliners voted — by more than 68 percent, on the “100% Tempelhofer Feld” initiative — to ban construction on the field entirely, overriding the Senate’s development plans. It remains the clearest case of the city’s residents winning a fight against redevelopment, and standing on the empty runway you’re standing on the result of that vote.

The village inside the district

For a complete change of pace, walk to Richardplatz and the old streets of Rixdorf, in the southeastern part of Neukölln. This is the district’s secret: a genuine 18th-century village core, founded in 1737 when Prussia settled Moravian Protestant refugees here (“Bohemian Rixdorf”), with cobbled lanes, a smithy, courtyards and the small Bethlehemskirche giving it a small-town feel utterly unlike the bar-strip Neukölln a few stops north. Nearby, Körnerpark — a sunken, neo-baroque garden laid out in 1916, with a café and gallery — is one of the most beautiful and least-touristed green spaces in Berlin. Both are reminders that Neukölln is much older and much deeper than its current reputation as a nightlife frontier suggests.

How it is changing

Neukölln is the district Berliners point to when they argue about gentrification, and for good reason: the change has been fast and visible. The Reuterkiez went from low-rent to fashionable in roughly a decade; rents have climbed steeply; the bar-and-café scene has thickened with money; and the long-standing Turkish and Arab working-class population that gave the district its character now lives alongside — and under cost pressure from — a wave of international newcomers and the businesses that serve them. The proposed redevelopment of the Hermannplatz Karstadt site has been a flashpoint precisely because it crystallizes the fear of large-scale change.

I won’t give you a fabricated rent figure, because Berlin’s housing crisis is city-wide and politically fraught and the trustworthy specifics for one Kiez are slippery year to year. What I can report from the street is the layering: the Späti and the natural-wine bar on the same block, the shawarma counter and the third-wave coffee shop sharing a corner, the old residents and the new ones using the same U8 platform. Neukölln hasn’t been resolved into one thing — it’s mid-argument, in public, and that tension is exactly what makes it the most interesting district in Berlin to walk right now.

What to skip, what to make for

Skip the urge to treat Klunkerkranich as the whole point — it’s a great sunset, but it’s the postcard, not the neighborhood. Make for Weserstraße after dark and bar-hop on foot. Eat on Sonnenallee, late and cheap. Hit the Maybachufer market if it’s a Tuesday or Friday. And spend an hour on Tempelhofer Feld in daylight, walking a runway, to feel the scale of the strangest park in Berlin.

The wider point

Neukölln is Berlin’s clearest case study in how fast a cheap, immigrant-built district can turn into the city’s most desirable one — and what that does to the people who made it desirable in the first place. The cheap rents drew the artists; the artists drew the scene; the scene drew the money; the money is now pushing on everything that came before. Go drink on Weserstraße, eat on Sonnenallee, watch the sun set from the mall roof, and notice that the energy you’re enjoying is the same energy steadily pricing out the neighborhood that generated it.

Verification

Reported and fact-checked against primary sources (verified 2026-05-20):

Frequently asked questions

How do I get to north Neukölln?
The U8 line is the spine: Schönleinstraße and Hermannplatz drop you straight into the Reuterkiez and the Weserstraße bar strip. Hermannplatz is also on the U7, which continues to Rathaus Neukölln (for the Klunkerkranich rooftop) and Karl-Marx-Straße. Tempelhofer Feld is reachable via Boddinstraße (U8) on the southern edge.
What is Klunkerkranich?
A bohemian rooftop bar and cultural garden on top of the Neukölln Arcaden shopping mall's parking garage at Karl-Marx-Straße 66 — take the U7 to Rathaus Neukölln, go up to the top floor of the car park. It has DJs, concerts, a community garden and a wide sunset view over Berlin.
What is Sonnenallee known for?
Sonnenallee is Neukölln's Arab high street, sometimes called 'Arab Street,' lined with Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian bakeries, shawarma counters, hookah cafés and grocers. It's one of the best and cheapest places to eat in this part of Berlin.
Can you walk on the old Tempelhof airport?
Yes. Tempelhofer Feld is the decommissioned Tempelhof airport, now a vast public park where the runways are open for cycling, skating and picnicking, with community gardens along the edges. It borders south Neukölln and is free to enter.