The correct decision: "Berlin Saves the Communist-Era Buildings of Alexanderplatz."

The photos above were snapped around Alexanderplatz during our visit to Berlin last fall.

2014 Euro Reunion Tour, Day 4: To Leninplatz and the Imbiss, 25 years later.

To me, these views are just as iconic as Times Square, and it pleases me to see the preservationist instinct applied to Alexanderplatz.

Berlin Saves the Communist-Era Buildings of Alexanderplatz, by Feargus O'Sullivan (City Lab)

Berlin has just said “yes” to Communist-era blocks and “no” to more new skyscrapers. On Monday, the city announced that it was listing some key Communist-era structures in Alexanderplatz, East Berlin’s central square, as historical monuments. It is an irremovable nail in the coffin of a 22-year-old plan to demolish the square and replace it with a “little Manhattan”—a set of 10 new 150-meter high towers. The decision is a contentious one: the new monuments just confirmed are in a late-1960s modernist style that many people still hate.

2014 Euro Reunion Tour, Day 4: To Leninplatz and the Imbiss, 25 years later.

From 2014 back to 1989.

Throughout our two days in Berlin, I was unable to break the habit of referring to "East" and "West," even though these distinctions became moot so very long ago. On Saturday, we bought an all-day transit pass and headed for Alexanderplatz, and an appointment with ghosts.

The structural topography of eastern Berlin areas built during DDR times is distinctive and unmistakable, and will continue to be in spite of various methods, paint, architectural embellishments and newer construction. East Germany remade its Berlin zone into a showplace for a certain way of urban thinking, as the following illustrate.

The world clock stood during the 1980s. East Germans morosely noted that it showed the time in all those place they weren't allowed to go.

A short distance away, Karl Marx Allee (no, the name has not been changed) and Strausberger Platz were built in an earlier, 1950s-era totalitarian model. I've seen examples of architecture of this type scattered across the former East Bloc.

From Strausberger Platz, it's only a short walk to the site where the Lenin statue once stood. The area around it, both inside and outside Volkspark Friedrichshain, was where I worked during August, 1989. Below, a view of the building where several days were spent tidying and pruning.

Just within the Volkspark was the Imbiss where my work crew drank lunch. It has been replaced by a pleasant beer garden and year-round restaurant and small events hall. A more peaceful location to enjoy an indigenous Berliner-style wheat ale seemed unimaginable.

In Germany, beer gardens invariably boast children's play areas. It's a sane way of acknowledging that drinking beer and enjoying one's family are not mutually exclusive. However, I must admit that the placement of the cigarette machine was cause for mirth.

On Sunday, a train to Bamberg awaited.