Closing an Icon

Came across this in the news yesterday..

An initiative to save Berlin's Tempelhof airport from closure failed to win enough support as voters, primarily in the city's former communist east, opted not to turn up at polling stations in a city-wide referendum.

Tempelhof, the main site of the post-World War II Berlin Airlift, has become the focal point of a movement that sought to preserve the historic building.

A limestone edifice that was molded in the 1930s by the Nazis into one of the world's largest buildings, Tempelhof was one of the main landing points for allied supply planes in the 11-month Soviet blockade in 1948-49. Architect Norman Foster has called it ``the mother of all airports.''
--from Bloomberg.com

When I was in Berlin in 1970 I went to the airport just to see it. I didn't have a flight or anything, I just wanted to be in a historic spot. The Berlin Airlift was still in a lot of people's minds at the end of the first decade of the Berlin Wall. I will have to dig out some of my old slides of that trip and scan them in.

In any case, an old airport isn't like some Roman Ruin or anything. I guess time has to move on.