Spittelberg

Neighborhood · Neubau (7th)Vienna,Austria

A grid of low painted houses on car-free cobbled lanes in Vienna, saved from demolition in the 1970s and now an expensive address.

Spittelberg is the quarter Vienna decided not to demolish. Turn in from Burggasse and the traffic noise drops within a few steps: cars are kept out, so you walk down the middle of a cobbled lane between two-storey fronts painted yellow, green and pink. Above many doors sits the house's old name from the years before houses had numbers. Almost every ground floor is a restaurant, a bar or a small shop, and the lanes are the whole visit. At the end of the 1960s this grid of low houses stood derelict and marked for clearance. It had been a quarter of brothels and rowdy inns since the 1700s, built so tight that hardly a house had a yard. Architects and artists objected, then the tenants joined them, arguing that repairing the houses must not mean pushing them out. The city gave way and repaired them instead. The tenants the campaign fought for have largely gone, and the quarter they saved is now an expensive address.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Enter from Burggasse and take Spittelberggasse or Gutenberggasse — Those two lanes kept most of their old fronts, while the outer streets were rebuilt taller in the late 1800s.
Do not come before late morning — Nearly every ground floor here is a kitchen or a bar, so until the shutters go up the lanes are genuinely empty.
Look for the saints set into the house fronts — Spittelberggasse 11 and 20 each keep a carved figure standing in a niche at first-floor height, left from the quarter's earliest houses.
December is the one month this quarter is not quiet — A craft market fills the lanes stall to stall from mid-November, and after dark the crowd moves at shuffling pace.

Things to do

1
Read the house names above the doors
Start where Gutenberggasse meets Burggasse and walk down with your eyes above door height. These houses were named before they were numbered, and some fronts still carry the old sign: the red apple, the white lion, the black elephant, the whale. One is even called kiss-the-penny. Nothing is labelled or explained.
2
Stand under the wooden galleries at the Amerlinghaus
Walk in at Stiftgasse 8. Neighbours occupied this house when it was due to come down, and since 1978 it has been run as a public culture centre, so the yard stays open. Stand in the middle and look up: a wooden gallery runs round the first floor on stone columns, and every flat's door opened onto it.
3
Find the windows that are only paint
Stand in front of Spittelberggasse 9 and look hard at the window surrounds. They are not carved. They are painted flat onto the wall in perspective, so the front seems to have depth it does not have. Restorers uncovered the painting under later coats of plaster when the quarter was repaired.