BERLIN — On Tuesday, the last of the Kunsthaus Tacheles’s inhabitants left the complex peacefully. Though previous attempts at eviction led to street-blocking protests and angry clashes with the police, it seems that even the most hardened of the former department store’s squatters were through with the struggle.

In its glory days, Tacheles was a beacon of Berlin bohemia. East German artists moved in after the fall of the Wall to save the building from demolition, and it became the most powerful emblem — especially to those outside Berlin — of those early stages in the city’s reunification. But just as local property rights have moved from an anarchic free-for-all to a money-driven real estate system dominated by multi-nationals, so too has Tacheles transformed from something authentic into an overrated, experiential souvenir.

Perhaps the hope with evicting the building's last hangers-on is that the slew of similarly tourist-laden theme bars and restaurants will also move away too — perhaps to Kreuzberg, where the Oranienstrasse is already beginning to feel like a theme park version of the neighborhood’s forer lefty and artistic self. This may go down as the next step in Berlin’s unstoppable redevelopment by foreign investment funds.

The fear of that very transformation likely brought the majority of protestors to support Tacheles in the first place. It was a shred of something that could be held onto: as long as it was there, there would be proof that the city's artistic community hadn’t really sold out. But a look inside — or at the building's exterior, for that matter — reveals that the famous graffiti had long faded and been scribbled over, artists most politely qualifiable as “outsiders” had taken over most of the studios, and the most artful activities taking place were those designed to lure tourists into this formerly thriving center of creative energy.

This article originally appeared on Berlin Art Brief.