The story
As you walk, listen to the rhythm of your feet against the pavement and look at the way the light catches the tops of the buildings here in the tenth district. You are walking through Favoriten, a part of Vienna that has always known the value of a hard day’s work. The street you are on, Erlachgasse, feels steady and unpretentious, a long straight line of residential blocks and local shops. But the name it carries belongs to a man who lived a life of extraordinary, golden grandiosity.
This street is named after Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. He was born in 1656 and died in 1723, and if you have spent any time in the center of Vienna, you have already walked through his imagination. Fischer von Erlach was the preeminent architect of the Austrian Baroque. He was the man who took the raw ambition of the Habsburg Empire and turned it into stone, marble, and gold. He designed the initial plans for Schönbrunn Palace and the magnificent Karlskirche with its towering columns. He even designed the National Library. He was a sculptor and an architect who studied in Rome and brought that Italian sense of drama back to the north.
So, why name a street after him here, in a neighborhood so different from the palatial Ringstrasse? The city gave this street its name in 1864. At that time, Vienna was exploding with growth. The old city walls had come down, and new districts were being laid out to house the people who were building the modern city. By naming a street in Favoriten after the Emperor’s own architect, the city was connecting the working-class suburbs to the imperial heart of Vienna. It was a way of saying that the history of the greats belonged to everyone, not just those living in palaces.
Today, Erlachgasse is a vital artery of the district. It stretches a long way, connecting the busy Laxenburger Straße with the quieter industrial edges near Absberggasse. As you walk, you will notice the street is a tapestry of different eras. There are the classic nineteenth-century apartment houses with their tall, rhythmic windows, and the sturdy communal housing blocks that went up later to ensure every Viennese citizen had a dignified place to live. It is a street of transit and transition, often humming with the sound of the nearby railway lines and the chatter of a dozen different languages.
Before you continue on your way, take a moment to look up at the very top of the building nearest to you. Notice where the stone meets the sky. Fischer von Erlach spent his whole life obsessing over how a building silhouette looks against the clouds. Even here, on a practical street built for daily life, that same sky spans the distance between his palaces and the pavement beneath your feet.