How an Entire Street Gets Illegally Knocked Down Overnight

They came by night in masks, carrying baseball bats. When 20 to 30 men in balaklavas turned up on Hercegovačka Street in Belgrade, Serbia, last month at 2 a.m., hardly anyone was around. The masked group had tied up some night watchmen, but their goal wasn’t anything to do with mass robbery or inter-gang score-settling. Accompanied by three diggers, the men had actually come to raze the entire street to the ground. By dawn—and despite several desperate calls to the police—Hercegovačka Street was a pile of rubble.

Why? The street and its surrounding area stand in the way of a grandiose plan to rebuild Belgrade’s Sava Waterfront. A scrappy but lively area where elegant art nouveau tenements mingle with cheap prefabs, the neighborhood has been earmarked as the site for one of the Balkan Peninsula’s biggest ever development projects, a 6.5 million square-foot quarter that will house the region’s tallest skyscraper.