RAW-Gelände — the former Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk, a railway repair yard built in 1867 and decommissioned after reunification — is a sprawling industrial site behind Warschauer Straße that Berlin has never quite decided what to do with, which is exactly why it works. The grounds hold a skate park built into a ruined building, a bouldering and climbing wall, a beach bar, a boxing club, an Urban Spree gallery, and enough bare concrete and broken glass to remind you what the district looked like in the 1990s. Cassiopeia and Suicide Circus, two of the best mid-sized clubs in the city, operate from converted halls on the site and run on Friday and Saturday nights.
On weekends the RAW flea market spreads across the yard — a good, unpretentious secondhand market with a strong line in 1970s and 80s East German objects, vinyl, and clothes. It is less curated and more genuinely cheap than the Mauerpark market. The site is permanently under threat of redevelopment, which makes each visit feel slightly provisional; it has been provisional since about 2005 and somehow keeps going.