The Viennese suburbs that began on the periphery of the Ringstrasse. Although pegged with the label of being a hotbed of crime and squalor, the suburbs didn’t entirely live up to that stereotype. It was a reputation derived from the aristocratic condescension of a city whose cultural and economic epicenter lay firmly planted in the city, and whose outsiders (again both social and economic) were, in somewhat of a contrast to the American model, flushed to the suburbs.
The original, fortified city of Vienna. The Ringstrasse contains the Alstadt.
Literally, it is the wide belt of land, two and one half miles in diameter and sixty-one yards wide constructed in 1857, on which rests both public buildings and private homes that separates the original, inner Vienna from its suburbs. But the notion of “Ringstrasse Vienna” has taken on a much larger meaning, it has surpasses it’s physical applications to become a concept unto itself (not entirely coincidental), as Carl E. Schorske put it, Ringstrasse Vienna has become “a way of summoning to mind the characteristics of an era, equivalent to the notion ‘Victorian’ to Englishmen, ‘Grunderzeit’ to Germans, or ‘Second Empire’ to the French.[i]”
It was the aristocratic version of the four to six story high apartment house that literally meant “aristocratic palace.”
The Bourgeoisie version of the Adelspalais, the Mietpalast surged in popularity with the creation of the Ringstrasse. Literally translated it means “rent-palace.”
The wall that surrounded and fortified the city of Vienna until the creation of the Ringstrasse. In order to ward off the Turks, who posed a threat to Viennese stability into the seventeenth century, a wall was constructed that made Vienna, like most historic cities, a fortified one. The wall was torn down under the rule of Franz-Joseph (1848-1916) with the creation of the Ringstrasse.
[i] Schorske, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna, P.24