Page "Potsdamer Platz" Paragraph 11

So the layout stayed put, although in 1823-4 Schinkel did get to rebuild the Potsdam Gate.

Formerly little more than a gap in the customs wall, it was replaced by a much grander affair consisting of two matching Doric-style stone gate-houses, like little temples ( a nod to Friedrich Gilly perhaps ), facing each other across Leipziger Straße.

The one on the north side served as the customs house and excise collection point, while its southern counterpart was a military guardhouse, set up to prevent desertions of Prussian soldiers, which had become a major problem.

The new gate was officially dedicated on 23 August 1824.

The design also included a new look for Leipziger Platz.

Attempts to create a market there to draw off some of the frenetic commercial activity in the centre of the city had not been successful.

And so Schinkel proposed to turn it into a fine garden, although this part of the design was not implemented.

It was a rival plan by gardener and landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné ( 1789 – 1866 ), drawn up in 1826, that went ahead in 1828 but with modifications.

In later years Lenné would completely redesign the Tiergarten, a large wooded park formerly the Royal Hunting Grounds, also give his name to Lennéstraße, a thoroughfare forming part of the southern boundary of the park, very close to Potsdamer Platz, and transform a muddy ditch to the south into one of Berlin's busiest waterways, the Landwehrkanal.