The coast of Maltepe has been a retreat from the city since Byzantine and Ottoman times, and right up until the 70s was a rural area peppered with summer homes for wealthy Istanbul residents. The population grew rapidly from the 70's onwards when, following the building of the Bosphorus Bridge, it became possible to commute from here to the city. Also the former rural area became an urban area with hundreds of concrete buildings. The E5 highway cuts through Maltepe and north of the highway is the poorer area of Başıbüyük, a tree-covered hill with a hospital on it (formerly Istanbul's tuberculosis isolation hospital) and also a large cemetery.Nowadays, Maltepe offers the hopeless landscape of thousands of concrete buildings constructed in a similar way and piled up side by side, in a small piece of land limited by the Marmara Sea in one side, and some small mountains in the other side. There is not any kind of master plan there. In the middle of this space, there is huge mosque built in the 90s, an impressive post modern copy in ottoman style. The small mountains surrounding the district in the back were in the past slums, and over time, the original shacks built in the slopes have given way to the construction of small houses of concrete, piled one another among small alleys.
