Named after Riesa, a town on the Elbe in Saxony.
Riesa’s name goes back to ‘Riezowe’, first recorded in 1119; it means something like a cut in the land and is freely rendered as ‘place at the river mouth’. The street was named in 1987: many streets of the new Hellersdorf estates were named after towns in the GDR districts that sent the building workers.