Lucerna Palace

Historic · New Town (Nové Město) — Vodičkova / ŠtěpánskáPrague,Czechia

Prague's first arcade, a glass-roofed public passage cut through a private block by Václav Havel's grandfather, with a horse hanging upside down in it.

Lucerna is a glass-roofed passage cut straight through a city block, and hanging head-down in its atrium is a horse with St Wenceslas sitting on its belly. David Černý made it. The block it cuts through stands just off Wenceslas Square, where the upright saint it answers is. Around the passage are a cinema, a ballroom, offices and shops, all reached off the same corridor. The hall below has held boxing matches, balls and several generations of Czech popular music, and it is still in use. The man who built it was Vácslav Havel, and it took him fourteen years, from 1907 to 1921, with Stanislav Bechyně as his engineer. It was the first arcade building in Prague: a public route cut through a private block and roofed in glass. His grandson Václav was born into the family in 1936. When the state took everything in 1948 that inheritance turned into a mark against him, and being a builder's grandson was enough to keep him out of university. Cut through it today and it is still doing that job: most people crossing the block are not looking at anything.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Enter from Vodičkova and walk through to Štěpánská — the passage is a shortcut locals use, not an attraction with a door, and both ends look like ordinary shopfronts from the pavement.
Look at the balconies and the glass roof, not the shops — the concrete galleries running round the atrium are what the building was famous for, and the shopfronts underneath them have changed a dozen times.
Read the two Havels correctly — Vácslav the builder put this up, and his grandson Václav became president; the spellings differ by one letter and the confusion is repeated constantly.

Things to do

1
Stand under the hanging horse
Walk into the atrium and position yourself directly beneath the sculpture. From below you see the animal suspended by its hooves with its tongue out, and the saint riding the underside of it as though nothing were wrong. Read it against the upright monument on Wenceslas Square a few minutes away, which is what it was made to answer.
2
Use the arcade as a shortcut, the way it was designed
Go in from one street and out on the other without stopping to shop. The passage was built to be a public route through a private block, glass-roofed against the weather, and it still works that way. Walking it end to end tells you more about what the building was for than any single room does.
3
Buy a seat for whatever is on downstairs
Take a seat for a film in the cinema or a night in the Great Hall. These are the only ways into the rooms, and both are still doing the job they were built for rather than being shown as heritage. The hall downstairs has carried boxing, balls and several generations of Czech popular music.