“Leipziger Straße, now Berlin’s best shopping address, perfectly worldly and in the evening – with its pearl-necklace of electric street-lights – a picture to behold, made in the 1880s a rather provincial impression: unadorned houses with one of two storeys (…) Only a couple of small stores – some might still remember the early days of Wertheim in a small cottage on the corner of Mauerstraße. On both sides of the road filthy gutters covered with wooden planks before each house entrance and in the evening yellow flickering gas-lights.”

From Adolf Heilborn’s Die Reise nach Berlin, 1921