New Berlin airport comes in from the cold
BERLIN, Nov 14 (Reuters) - A giant landscape of mud and meadows that will become Berlin's new international airport was revealed to the public on Wednesday with the unveiling of a visitors' tower in one of Europe's largest construction sites.
The 2-billion euro ($2.9 billion) airport, to open in 2011, will replace three small airports that serviced Berlin through the Cold War, and belatedly give an economic lift to a city still struggling with the after-effects of postwar division.
Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit, who dedicated the lonely windswept tower, told Reuters the new airport should be named after former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.
Wowereit said the airport, which was on the drawing board for 17 years after the Berlin Wall fell until work started in 2006, would be an urgently needed catalyst for business activity and tourism in Germany's largest city.
"I think it's a good idea to name the airport after Willy Brandt," he added.
Nobel Peace Prize lauerate Brandt was West Germany's first Social Democratic chancellor and the popular mayor of West Berlin when East Germany's communist authorities in 1961 built the Wall that divided the city for the next three decades.
"There's a lot of support in the public for that, as we've seen in opinion polls," said Wowereit, also a Social Democrat. "We'll make a board decision when the time comes."
TOWER
The 32-metre high "info tower" offers a panorama of the largest infrastructure project in eastern Germany, over an area equal to 2,000 soccer pitches that will be transformed into the first new airport to be built in Europe in nearly two decades.
From the platform can already be seen a deep crevice for a new intercity railway station.
The airport is expected to create up to 70,000 jobs in Berlin and the Brandenburg region. It is also expected to help Berlin compete with wealthier Frankfurt and Munich, much smaller metropolitan areas with far larger airports.
The new airport in the southeast corner of Berlin will be triple the size of the current Schoenefeld airport and located about two kilometres (a mile) south of communist East Berlin's old airport.
Tegel in the west -- Berlin's main airport, bursting at its seams -- and Tempelhof in the city centre will be shut down in 2011. The three airports now handle 18 million passengers per year. The new airport will cope with 25 to 40 million.
Construction began without much fanfare in September 2006 -- after finally winning court rulings and two small towns and their 350 inhabitants were relocated. But work has so far gone largely unnoticed.
That changed with the opening of the "info tower", which officials hope will become a tourist magnet for hundreds of thousands of visitors, as did the "info box" at Berlin's Potsdamer Platz construction site in the early 1990s.
"All those sceptics can now see for themselves that we're no longer in the planning phase but building," Wowereit said.