American soldiers haul away the Checkpoint Charlie guardhouse; the Cold War crossing is gone

For twenty-nine years, a small metal container on Friedrichstraße had been one of the most loaded addresses on earth. On June 22, 1990 — seven months after crowds had torn into the Berlin Wall with pickaxes — American soldiers removed the guardhouse at Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point that had stood as the sharpest physical symbol of the Cold War divide. The shed that replaced a wooden hut in 1976 was hauled away to the Allied Museum; the confrontation it had witnessed, between two nuclear superpowers who had once aimed tanks at each other across this very street, was declared, at last, over…