Swimming with gargoyles: how a single building tells the changing story of East Berlin

For many years, Berlin has been an affordable European capital where you can indulge in a unique spirit of art and anarchy. But that spirit is disappearing, and quickly.

Despite the city government's 2016 pledge to regulate AirBnB, the company boasted 700,000 Berlin bookings last year. This has put pressure on  a rental market that was once the best value on the continent, meaning that a culture where sharing and cover-my-rent flat-sitting were widely available has been usurped by over-charging. The result is an average rent hike of about 30 per cent over the last two years.

Blissfully unaware that they're at least ten years late for the party, disaffected Americans and Brits have come to Berlin in huge numbers since Trump and the EU referendum, adding to the strain on supply. Then, of course, there are the Russian-financed exclusive apartment blocks and glass skyscrapers, the 36 hotels currently being built across the city, and a general bauboom (construction boom). The race is on to meet the demand, and at an ever-increasing cost. In fact, such is the speed of construction and renovation, there is a ten-week waiting list for painters and fitters.

Meanwhile, as well as a mid-April march against exorbitant rents, there are daily protests, especially in the once cheap, radical, and diverse districts of former east Berlin. In Kreuzberg, a pavement on Wrangelstrasse has been turned into a grave, bemoaning the death of affordable rents and alternative lifestyles. Prenzlauer Berg, once the focal point of the post-wall art scene, has in recent years become the demesne of young hipster families, trust-fund expats, and weekenders with enough cash to sample the brand Berlin.

The district's main thoroughfare, Kastanienallee (Chestnut Avenue), has become known as “casting alley”—the place to be seen in your oversize coat and tote on a Sunday afternoon, even if you don't notice the old anti-capitalist squat on the same street. The last vestiges of the independent scene are being erased: the latest, Bassy Club, closes its doors on May 1,“not the victims of gentrification, but of the death of Prenzlauer Berg” says its website.

Yet just off Kastanienallee, on Oderberger Strasse, there is a grand, ministerial-looking building with an extraordinary past. Built between 1898 and 1902 in the neorenaissance style borrowing Greek and Italianate motifs, the elegant facade and interior are adorned with flourishes by the best-known German sculptor of that era, Otto Lessing, who also worked on the Reichstag and the Berlin Cathedral, as well as creating a famous statue of Shakespeare in Weimar.

Over the huge front entrance at Oderberger Strasse 57, Lessing fashioned a Berlin bear flanked by nymphs, while the palace-like facade is alive with turtles, lobsters, and seahorses hinting at an aquatic function within. There is also the figure of a lady clutching a sponge. A sponge? Yes, until its closure in 1986, the building served the community as a ''Volksbadeanstalt''—a public bathhouse.

“In the 70s, I would go every week for a bath,'” explained local artist, Doris Leue.“I would pay 20 pfennig, and sit in the waiting room until my number was called. Then I'd go up to my cabin and a woman in white overalls would be filling the tub and telling me to get a move on.”

“Fifteen minutes later, she'd be knocking at the door, saying ‘Hurry! Hurry! The next one is coming!’ It was an old tub and smelled of chlorine, but it's all we had in the east. A few years later my daughter learned to swim in the pool downstairs.'”

When the bathhouse closed in 1986, the local Oderberger 16 art group staged punk concerts and underground happenings there. In 2011, with the premises facing demolition, the building was finally rescued by GLS, a family firm who had already saved the five buildings of a former school in the courtyard, and transformed them into the campus of a thriving language school.

They pledged to restore the historic pool for public use, while transforming the main site into a 70-room hotel. The rooms come with original cabin doors, benches, and sometimes tiles. The real joy, however, is the pool.

The huge windows allow an ecclesiastical light to flicker across the turquoise water, and the balconies are festooned with lilies and crests by Lessing. The effect is like swimming in a church. It is uncanny, this combination of buoyancy and the heaviness of stone while you float on your back and ponder the arches and enclaves; the vaulted ceiling above.

Under the monument protection scheme, the pool's original twenty-metre length was reinstated, as were the former windows. Gargoyles clutching ancient tablets (or floats) leer at you from both ends of the pool, and, as the sun moves round, each new strain of light reveals yet more of Lessing's delicate artistry. It costs six euros to swim amid such splendours, just fifty cents more than the local municipal pool. And you don't have to jump in an old tub afterwards. All the shower facilities are new.

If you go down to the building's former pump-room in the basement, you'll find the original pipes, cogs and taps have been integrated into the hotel's restaurant. The food is a winning post-swim fusion of Bavarian fare—plenty of meat and sauerkraut—with a more restrained nouveau cuisine, so you could opt for a braised pork knuckle or settle for bacon-wrapped perch or pearl barley risotto, rounded off with Berliner Cream Pie. A three-course menu costs 39 euros.

Everywhere there are respectful acknowledgements of the building's past. The bathhouse's original cash-window forms part of the entrance to the small library. A “history room” on the first floor offers black-and-white photographs of the site from the early 1900s, while another series shows naked east-Berlin punks frolicking round the decaying venue in the late '80s. Each guest-room, meanwhile, boasts work from a Berlin-based artist, and there is a huge and colourful mural on the theme of “Strong women” in the courtyard, inspired by the mother and daughter team who run the company. On Tuesday evenings, it is father's turn: he hosts a free history tour of the premises.

As Oderberger Strasse 57 has traced former East Berlin's development since the early twentieth-century burst into modernity, could the building's current phase—of community-oriented restoration—mark a new initiative, even in the midst of the city's latest construction boom and soaring rents? Or is that just wishful thinking?

“'Of course every renovation project can be seen as gentrification,” explained Verena, the hotel director, and daughter. “We have to pay back our loans and eventually make money like everyone else. But we restored these buildings, and the swimming pool, with respect for their history as a public institution, and we would like to see it become a meeting place for locals again.”

Which seems fair enough. After all, it is far safer to swim with gargoyles than with oligarchs or sharks.