First it was the dealers. Photo by Anastasia Chistyakova This all has to go. The whores, the pimps. They are even standing in front of my door fighting over turf. With apartments and home to individuals from 25 nations, for decades the place was known as an urban disaster. Most of the residents were on the dole.
Drug dealers plied their trade in dark corridors which dripped water from exposed pipes. There were junkies, and sometimes at night you could hear gunshots. Dead babies were found in dumpsters. Graffiti was everywhere. When he is not rapping and hanging out in the hood, he is working as a security guard at Mediamarkt in Tempelhof. Times have changed: the Bezirksamt has stepped in, and Pallas is now Sozialpalast. There are waiting lists instead of vacancies.
No more graffiti and leaky pipes. No more junkies and drug dealers. I was standing right here when I saw a couple of guys running from a man with a gun. That is the kind of thing you see here at night. But no one talks about these things.
In recent years the situation has worsened dramatically. Whores everywhere. Someone has to do something. Because children are playing here. And the whores go to the park and you see condoms everywhere. There was a major brawl and the pimps beat a hasty retreat. Since then there has been an uneasy truce between pimps and residents. He hung out with rappers Sido and Bushido and has appeared in the rap videos of Alpa Gun and Big Baba, two local rappers who have gone on to national fame.
But the whores and everything, no one has anything against that. The police is working with them, man. The state is working with them, gets money from them, or Over 10 years ago they roughed up junkies, who in turn called the cops. He was a guy from the pub, an old guy. We wanted him to talk to the newspapers so the police would leave us alone. We have to keep our streets clean. Politics are messy. I was born here and I am going to die here.
