Boxhagener Platz — Boxi to everyone who lives nearby — is the social centrepiece of eastern Friedrichshain. On Saturday mornings a flea market fills the square, a well-stocked mix of secondhand furniture, clothes, records, and household objects that draws a regular crowd of neighbourhood people rather than tourists. Sundays bring a smaller farmers' market, with seasonal produce, cheese, and bread from regional suppliers. The playground at one end is perpetually occupied; the benches at the other are where people sit with takeaway coffee from the surrounding cafés and ignore the time.
The streets around the square — particularly Krossener Straße and the western end of Simon-Dach-Straße — are lined with the bars and café-restaurants that have made the neighbourhood. The places here are less self-consciously on show than some of the Simon-Dach-Straße strip further east: a bit quieter, a bit more local. On warm evenings people spill out of every door and the square proper becomes a kind of outdoor living room. It's not a sight in the conventional sense — there's nothing to see as such — but it's one of the better places in Berlin to feel like you're in a real neighbourhood rather than a tourist zone.