Stadtpark

Park · Parkring (1st)Vienna,Austria

Vienna's first public park, opened in 1862 on ground cleared of the city walls, with a gilded Johann Strauss playing his violin among composers' statues.

The Stadtpark is the Ring's first public park, and the thing everybody photographs in it is gilded. The monument to Johann Strauss the younger shows him playing his violin under a white marble arch, and it is usually called the most photographed statue in the city. Around it stand other Viennese composers and artists: a seated Schubert, busts of Bruckner and Lehár, among the trees. The little River Wien runs through the middle of the park. The Wienflussportal marks the point where the river leaves its vaulted tunnel, and the city dressed that exit in white stone pavilions, stairs and balustrades. The park opened in 1862 on ground freed by the demolition of the walls, laid out in the loose English manner — curving paths, open lawns, specimen trees — as a deliberate contrast to Baroque geometry. Between noon and two it fills up as a lunch break for the offices on the Ring. At the edge stands the Kursalon, a hall built for spa concerts and for decades the home of nightly Strauss-and-Mozart programmes. It closed in January 2025 for a rebuild, and the chocolate maker Lindt takes it over next.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Otto Wagner built the station at the park edge — the U4 platform opened in 1899, one of only two of his Stadtbahn stations left almost intact, and most people walk past it.
Not all of them are composers — three of the figures standing among the trees are nineteenth-century painters, Makart, Canon and Schindler, not musicians at all.
The far bank is a different park — the river splits the ground in two, and the southern half, laid out in 1863 as the Kinderpark, is still playground and sports ground rather than promenade.

Things to do

1
Take the steps down to the quay
Go down the steps to the water instead of looking from the bridge. From the quay you stand level with the tunnel mouth the river comes out of, and the carving Franz Klug cut into the retaining walls only reads from there.
2
Come back to the Strauss after dark
By day there is a queue at the monument: people wait their turn to stand under the violin, and the shot always has strangers in it. The Stadtpark has no gates and the statue is floodlit at night, so the same gold is there with nobody in front of it.