Gas Lamps in Berlin: Does Your Street Still Burn Gas?
It is half past four in November and already dark. Walk home along Wrangelstraße in Kreuzberg and the street light is soft, a little green, and it flickers slightly when you look up. Cross into Friedrichshain and the light turns hard and white, or the old orange. Most people notice the difference without ever asking why. The reason is that one side of the street is still burning gas.
Berlin has more gas street lamps than anywhere else I know of, and they are disappearing one street at a time. If you want to know whether yours is next, the official lighting register can tell you, lamp by lamp.
Gas lamps in Berlin: how many are left
Before the conversion programme began, Berlin had about 44,000 gas street lamps. The Senate decided in 2006 to switch them to electric light, mainly because of the energy they burn. By July 2025 the Senate told the Abgeordnetenhaus it was still running 17,400, in its answer to a written question. The city's public lighting register, which I checked on 10 November 2026, lists 16,332 gas lamps, and 15,728 of them burning.
The more surprising number is where they stand. About 95 per cent of them are in the former West. Pankow and Lichtenberg have none at all in the register, and the old East keeps only small pockets, such as the village centres of Kaulsdorf and Mahlsdorf and parts of Köpenick. Steglitz-Zehlendorf alone has 5,512, a third of the city's total.
Dorfstraße in Kaulsdorf, one of the few eastern streets that kept its gas light.
Does your street still burn gas?
This is the question I get from friends who just moved into an Altbau in Charlottenburg or Friedenau, and it has a real answer. If you like knowing your building's past, it pairs well with the old Berlin address books. Type your street into the map below. It shows every gas lamp in the official register, how many stand on your street, which kind they are, whether they are burning, and whether your street lies inside one of the areas where the city decided to keep gas.
You can also open the Berlin Gas Lamp Map on its own page. One thing to know when you read it: the register is the city's, but the dots for switched-off lamps are not all bad news. A lamp can be off because of a fault, a building site or a repair that is waiting for a part.
Which gas lamps will stay, and which will not
In 2012 and 2013 the Landesdenkmalamt and the Senate agreed on a set of areas where gas light should survive. The official map has 28 entries. They include the centre of Charlottenburg, the Rheinisches Viertel in Wilmersdorf, Siemensstadt, the Weiße Stadt in Reinickendorf, Onkel Toms Hütte, the old town of Spandau, Alt-Tegel, the Chamissoplatz quarter and Mariannenplatz in Kreuzberg, and the village greens of Lübars, Lichtenrade and Kaulsdorf. Together they hold about 3,300 gas lamps, according to the Senate's own gas lighting FAQ.
Inside those areas the post-top, hanging and model lamps are meant to stay on gas. Row lights are the exception: they are being switched to electric even there, except for 244 sites. Outside the areas there is no decision to keep anything. My map counts 3,204 gas lamps inside the official outlines and 13,128 outside them.
Two things make this less settled than it sounds. The Senate says there is no end date for the conversion: it happens as the budget allows, and in July 2025 another 1,500 conversions were already ordered. The Senate has also asked the Landesdenkmalamt to review the protected areas too, so that those 3,300 lamps could also go electric. The state's heritage council, the Landesdenkmalrat, answered in its recommendation of 11 July 2025 that the lamps outside the areas should be converted first, and the question looked at again after a few years.
So "protected" is a decision of 2013, not a promise. If you live on Wrangelstraße, where 81 of the street's 82 gas lamps stand outside any protected area, enjoy the light while it lasts.
The four gas lamps and how to tell them apart
The register sorts Berlin's gas lamps into a few families. Once you know them, you see them everywhere.
Post-top lantern (Aufsatzleuchte): a glass lantern sitting on top of a post, often the BAMAG U7 model. It is by far the most common, 14,433 of the lamps on the map.
Hanging lantern (Hängeleuchte): a lantern hanging from a curved or bracketed mast, common on wider streets and squares. 1,294 of them.
Row light (Reihenleuchte): a long, flat lantern with several mantles side by side, hung from a mast or an arm over the road. In 2011 there were still about 8,000. Only 250 are left in the register.
Special lamps: the register's group for unusual and historic designs. 355 of them.
A gas row light: one long lantern, several mantles side by side.
What makes the light look different is inside the glass. A gas lamp burns behind small fabric mantles that glow white-green when the gas heats them, which is why the light seems to breathe a little.
The glowing mantles in a lantern at the Gaslaternen-Freilichtmuseum in Tiergarten, December 2024.
A hanging gas lamp on the Bismarckallee bridge in Grunewald, inside one of the protected areas.
Why East and West Berlin look different at night
On 6 April 2013 a camera on the International Space Station photographed Berlin at night, and the old border showed up in the colours. That same April the astronaut Chris Hadfield posted his own Berlin picture from orbit and wrote that the light bulbs still showed the East/West division. Most of the East glows orange. Most of the West glows white with a green tint, and the dark rectangle of the Tiergarten sits right in the middle.
Berlin from the International Space Station on 6 April 2013: whiter light in the west, orange in the east.
The explanation is in the lamps. East Berlin's streets were lit mostly with sodium-vapour lamps, which give that yellow-orange light. The West used whiter mercury and fluorescent lamps, and on thousands of side streets it kept gas. A city official told The Guardian in 2013 that the money to make both halves match had simply never been there.
That map is now fading. LED lamps are replacing sodium in the East and gas in the West, and both turn the same neutral white. The old difference is worth seeing while it lasts. I liked those Berlin lamp shapes enough to put two of them, a curved mast with a long lamp and a straight post with a broad cap, on my Berlin Street Lights print.
Two familiar Berlin lamp shapes on a quiet cream ground. My Berlin Street Lights print, printed to order.
What a gas lamp costs the city
The Senate's own figures explain why the conversion goes on. A four-flame gas lamp cost about 470 euro in energy in 2024. The LED lamp that replaces it cost about 25 euro. A nine-flame gas lamp burned about 1,050 euro of gas against 75 euro for the LED, and puts out two tonnes more CO2 a year.
The catch is the price of the change. Converting one lamp costs about 10,000 euro, and the Senate puts the payback at roughly 12 years. Many conversions keep the old shape: a post-top lantern that looks the same in daylight, with an LED module inside. You only notice at night, when the light no longer moves.
Where to see them on a November evening
My move for a dark weekday: take the U-Bahn to Platz der Luftbrücke, walk about ten minutes to Chamissoplatz around 17:00, and do one slow loop of the square and the streets off it. It is a protected area, the houses are 19th-century, and the light is the old one.
If you live further west, Sophie-Charlotten-Straße in Charlottenburg has more gas lamps than any other street on the map, 95 of them, all inside protected areas. If you want the one most likely to change, walk Wrangelstraße in Kreuzberg instead. And if you like street details that only show after dark, I wrote about the city's lantern walks in November and the date your bike lights start to matter.
Image credits
Source and licence details for the 5 photographs used in this article.
A gas lamp on Dorfstraße in Kaulsdorf: Bildarbeiter, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Glowing gas mantles at the Gaslaternen-Freilichtmuseum: Reinhold Möller Ermell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A hanging gas lamp on the Bismarckallee bridge, Grunewald: Bodo Kubrak, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Berlin at night from the International Space Station, 6 April 2013: NASA Johnson Space Center, Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
A gas row light in front of a 1950s facade: Harald Malte Schwarz, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.