Just inside the gate was a large octagonal area, created at the time of Friedrichstadt's expansion in 1732-4 and bisected by Leipziger Strasse; this was one of several parade grounds for the thousands of soldiers garrisoned in Berlin at the height of the Kingdom of Prussia.

The one on the north side served as the customs house and excise collection point, while its southern counterpart was a military guardhouse, set up to prevent desertions of Prussian soldiers, which had become a major problem.

The development was piecemeal, but in 1828 this area just to the west of Potsdamer Platz, sandwiched between the Tiergarten and the north bank of the future Landwehrkanal, received royal approval for a more purposeful metamorphosis into a residential colony of the affluent, gradually filling with palatial houses and villas.

Six hundred meters to the southeast, with a front facade facing Askanischer Platz, the Anhalter Bahnhof was the Berlin terminus of a line running as far as Jüterbog and extended to Dessau, Kothen and beyond.

Half a dozen or more times a day, Potsdamer Platz ground to a halt while a train of 60 to 100 wagons trundled through at walking pace preceded by a railway official ringing a bell.

Vast hotels and department stores, hundreds of smaller shops, theatres, dance-halls, cafés, restaurants, bars, beer palaces, wine-houses and clubs, all started to appear.

Even the Reichstag itself, the German Parliament, occupied the former home of the family of composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47) in Leipziger Strasse before moving in 1894 to the vast new edifice near the Brandenburg Gate, erected by Paul Wallot (1841–1912).

The writer Theodor Fontane, painter Adolph von Menzel, and Dadaist Kurt Schwitters were all guests; Karl Liebknecht, the Spartacus Communist movement leader read a lot here and even made some key political speeches from the pavement terrace, while author Erich Kästner wrote part of his 1929 bestseller for children, Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives), on the same terrace and made the café the setting for an important scene in the book.

Meanwhile, in Bellevuestrasse, sandwiched between Café Josty and the Hotel Esplanade but extending right through the block with a separate entrance in Potsdamer Strasse, was the Weinhaus Rheingold, built by Bruno Schmitz (1858–1916) and opened on 6 February 1907.

In addition, the city's colossal pace of change (compared by some to that of Chicago[8]), had caused its chief planner, Martin Wagner (1885–1957), to foresee the entire centre being made over totally as often as every 25 years.

Meanwhile, the North-South Axis would have cut a giant swathe passing just to the west of Potsdamer Platz, some 5 km long and up to 100 m wide, and lined with Nazi government edifices on a gargantuan scale.

In the event, a substantial amount of demolition did take place in Potsdamer Straße, between the platz itself and the Landwehrkanal, and this became the location of the one Germania building that actually went forward to a state of virtual completion: architect Theodor Dierksmeier's Haus des Fremdenverkehrs (House of Tourism), basically a giant state-run travel agency.

As was the case in most of central Berlin,[9] almost all of the buildings around Potsdamer Platz were turned to rubble by air raids and heavy artillery bombardment during the last years of World War II.

Things were not helped by the very close proximity of Hitler's Reich Chancellery, just one block away in Voßstraße, and many other Nazi government edifices nearby as well, and so Potsdamer Platz was right in a major target area.

Since there was not, as yet, a fixed marker, the borders were prone to abuse, which eventually resulted (in August 1948), in white lines in luminous paint appearing across roads and even through ruined buildings to try to deter the Soviets from making unauthorised incursions into the American and British zones.

Remembering the effective use of propaganda in the leadup to the second World War, the opposing camps later began berating one another with enormous signs displaying loud political slogans, facing each other across the border zone.

(The Wise Berliner Buys With The HO) Underneath were the words NÄCHSTE VERKAUFSSTELLEN (Next Sales Premises), between two arrows pointing left and right, suggesting that large shopping developments were forthcoming in the immediate vicinity, although these never appeared.

Tensions finally reached breaking point and a Workers' Uprising took place on 17 June 1953, to be quickly and brutally crushed when Soviet tanks rolled in, and some of the worst violence occurred around Potsdamer Platz, where several people were killed by the Volkspolizei.

Below ground, the U-Bahn section through Potsdamer Platz had closed entirely; although the S-Bahn line itself remained open, it suffered from a quirk of geography in that it briefly passed through East German territory en route from one part of West Berlin to another.

For the benefit of the former, the row of post-war single-storey shops in Potsdamer Straße now sold a wide variety of souvenir goods, many of which were purchased by coach-loads of curious visitors brought specially to this sad location.

In one scene an old man named Homer, played by actor Curt Bois, searches in vain for Potsdamer Platz, but finds only rubble, weeds and the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall.

On 21 July 1990, ex-Pink Floyd member Roger Waters staged a gigantic charity concert of his former band's rock extravaganza The Wall to commemorate the end of the division between East and West Germany.

In particular, due to its location straddling the erstwhile border between east and west, it was widely perceived as a "linking element," reconnecting the two-halves of the city in a way that was symbolic as well as physical, helping to heal the historical wounds by providing an exciting new mecca attracting Berliners from both sides of the former divide.

A $2 billion development[20] bordering the west side of the former Potsdamer Bahnhof site, some of its 19 individual buildings were then erected by other architects, who submitted their own designs while maintaining Piano's key elements.

Across the complex, various artworks from the collection are installed, including pieces by Keith Haring (Untitled (The Boxers)), Mark di Suvero (Galileo), Robert Rauschenberg (The Riding Bikes) and Frank Stella (Prinz Friedrich Arthur von Homburg).

This new Sony Centre, designed by Helmut Jahn, is an eye-catching monolith of glass and steel featuring an enormous tent-like conical roof, its shape reportedly inspired by Mount Fuji in Japan, covering an elliptical central public space up to 102 metres across, and thus differing substantially from Hilmer & Sattler's original plan for the site.

Surviving parts of the former Hotel Esplanade have been incorporated into the north side of the Sony development, including the Kaisersaal which, in a complex and costly operation in March 1996, was moved in one piece (all 1,300 tonnes of it), some 75 metres from its former location, to the spot that it occupies today (it even had to make two right-angled turns during the journey, while maintaining its own orientation).

there are some "fake facades" where completed new buildings should be, while a long-running dispute over who owned the Wertheim department store site (or had claims to the revenue from its sale by the government), left another large gap in the central Berlin cityscape that is only now[when?]

Founded on 8 March 1991 in the basement strongrooms of the former Wertheim store's bank, these having survived the decades largely undamaged, the club finally closed on 16 April 2005 (it reopened on 24 May 2007 in a renovated power plant on Köpenicker Straße).

On 2 March 2008, a statue by the Berlin artist Alexander Polzin dedicated to Italian philosopher, priest, cosmologist, and occultist Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), was erected inside one of the entrances to the Potsdamer Platz Regionalbahnhof.