Karlín

Neighborhood · Karlín (Prague 8)Prague,Czechia

Prague's first planned suburb, drowned by the 2002 flood and rebuilt behind its nineteenth-century fronts, with a Baroque veterans' hospital at one end.

Karlín is a grid of long straight streets and wide blocks a few minutes east of the old town, and the fronts along them are nineteenth-century while almost everything behind is new. Plaster, cornices and tall windows on the street; offices, flats and cafés fitted in behind them since. The quarter stood metres deep in Vltava water in August 2002, and the rebuilding kept the facades and replaced the rest. At the eastern end is a Baroque veterans' hospital of the 1730s, set back on grass. The ground was laid out in 1817 and named after the emperor's wife, with a street plan generous enough that it still works two centuries later. Industry came, then engineering works, then the railway, and Karlín turned into a workers' quarter of factory hands and railwaymen. Its veterans' hospital is the work of Kilián Ignác Dientzenhofer, built on the model of the Paris Invalides. Most residents came back after the flood, which is why the quarter reads as rebuilt rather than replaced.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Walk the grid rather than a route — three long streets crossed by six short ones is the whole plan of 1817, and ten minutes of walking it teaches you more than any single building here.
Look at the doorways and then at the windows above them — many blocks kept their original street fronts and were entirely rebuilt behind, so the facade and the interior are a century and a half apart.
Look for the flood marks — the water of August 2002 stood metres deep in these streets, and some buildings still carry the line and the date where it reached.
The huge Baroque block at the eastern end is a veterans' hospital — built in the 1730s on the model of the Paris Invalides and only a fraction of the intended plan was ever completed.
This is a quarter that works on weekdays — offices, cafés and building sites rather than sights, which is the honest reason to come and the honest reason not to.

Things to do

1
Walk the right angles of the 1817 street plan
Pick any of the three long streets, walk it for ten minutes, then turn down a cross street to the river side. The right angles, the block sizes and the street widths are all from the 1817 plan, and walking them is the only way to feel how different this is from the tangle on the other side of Florenc.
2
Look at the Invalidovna from the grass
Walk to the eastern end and take the great Baroque block in from the open ground in front of it. It was designed for disabled soldiers on the model of the Paris Invalides, only part of it was ever built, and it has stood damaged and half-used for decades among ordinary apartment houses.