Outside of Berlin, the wall was seen through different eyes. The East Side Gallery touts itself as the largest open-air gallery in the world, featuring over 100 murals and paintings, which were added to the traditionally dour eastern side of the wall after 1989.

8-mile stretch of the structure, known as the East Side Gallery, still stands. Large sections-mostly the grim, grey eastern side-were simply crushed up and repurposed, to be used for road construction.įifteen years after the wall came down, Berlin began protecting what remained of it as a memorial to the once-divided city. An open border replaced the burdensome concrete slabs as a new symbol of Berlin for the city's inhabitants, the wall was nothing more than an embarrassment, a blight, a shackle to a past of separation, violence and grief.

The wall, erected in 1961, had taken a mere couple of weeks to build, and its destruction was equally swift-within a few years, nearly every trace of it had vanished from the city. When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, an instrument of nearly three decades of separation seemed to disappear from the streets of Berlin in a matter of days.

Is main street station casino open