Viennese municipal bath
The Wiener Kommunalbad (no official name; occasionally also called Strombad ) was a swimming pool set up by the Vienna city administration at the right bridgehead of the Reichsbrücke , in the 2nd district of Vienna, Leopoldstadt , with the address Erzherzog-Karl-Platz 4 (today Mexikoplatz ).
history
The Viennese communal pool was built from 1871–1876 a few meters upstream next to the Reichsbrücke , also completed in 1876 , at that time officially Kronprinz-Rudolf-Brücke, at the former swimming school maize (maize = young forest) , known since 1884 as Erzherzog-Karl-Platz , by the Vienna city administration according to plans by Franz Berger , 1883–1903 City Planning Director , built at a cost of the equivalent of 1.54 million crowns (770,000 guilders at the time of construction ). A considerable part of the construction work (as with the bridge) took place before the Danube river required for the bath was diverted to its new bed near the bath in 1875 according to the Viennese Danube regulation .
The municipal swimming pool and the public open-air swimming pool, which is located opposite in the floodplain on the left bank of the Danube, are not equipped with extensive infrastructure and are accessible free of charge, replace swimming pools that had to be closed due to the Danube regulation (see also Bathing and Swimming in Vienna ).
With a bathing season lasting around 100 days, the pool was visited by fewer than 50,000 (instead of the expected 120,000) people per year; about 22 percent of theirs were women. The Danube shore line of the kk state railways served the communalbad-Reichsbrücke passenger stop (right next to the bath) z B. May 1901 with 16 trains a day; The main means of transport to the spa were the tram lines running to and via Erzherzog-Karl-Platz : the horse-drawn tram since 1868, the "electric" from Praterstern since 1898, and the Bk (from the direction of Franz-Josefs-Kai - Ring ) and since 1907 25 ( Kagran –Praterstern), since 1911 line 16 (Praterstern– Stadlau Ostbahn), since 1913 also line B (from the direction of Ringstrasse - Franz-Josefs-Kai).
Austrian championships for men were held here for the first time in 1881: diving in the pool and swimming in the Danube from Klosterneuburg to the pool .
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Franz Joseph I 's reign, an international Kaiser Franz Joseph anniversary swimming competition was held in the pool on August 7, 1898, by the First Vienna Amateur Swimming Club . C. Ruberl from the Vienna Swimming Club Austria won the 100 m freestyle ( champion swimmer of Europe 1898 ) and Otto Wahle from the same swimming club over 1609 m ( champion swimmer of Austria 1898 ). A total of nine competitions took place.
In 1987 this event was described in a book as the forerunner of the European Swimming Championships, an assessment which, in view of the extremely small number of foreign participants, seems greatly exaggerated.
The Austrian swimmer Otto Scheff swam here on September 1, 1908 over 1000 m crawl and over a mile world records. Around 1900 the pool is said to have been the most beautiful open-air pool in the world.
The Viennese communal pool was closed shortly after the start of the war in 1914 and did not reopen after the First World War. Parts of the pool were used to equip the newly opened Alte Donau lido . The basin was used for laundry in the municipal baths until the 1920s.
Decades later, the location of the former communal pool was still used as a location: in "List No. 5", in which under Item II, Paragraph b, those assets of the DDSG located in eastern Austria are listed that were transferred to the former Soviet Union in the Austrian State Treaty should be; the fulfillment of this requirement of the Soviet Union could ultimately be avoided.
Furnishing
The pool had a 175.4 x 48.7 m large, brick-walled basin with a water depth of up to five meters, in which five swimming and full bath sections of different sizes (maximum 3,300 m²) were built: a large sports pool for men and women only four small pools, two each for women and men. The bath water was replaced by fresh Danube water up to 30 times a day and the water for the 32 showers and 15 bathtubs was also taken from the adjacent stream with a steam-operated pump. Only the drinking water came from the high spring pipeline of the Vienna water supply .
337 cabins (then called "bath cells") and 859 cloakroom boxes (then called "wardrobes") in wooden structures were available for changing rooms, as well as a restaurant, coffee house, tobacco shop , sunbathing area and sunbathing area.
In addition, the bathroom was equipped with a steam laundry, in which the bath linen loaned to the bathers was cleaned. Later the bath linen of the river baths in the Danube Canal was also cleaned here. The management of these baths was transferred to the manager of the communal baths at the beginning of the 20th century.
literature
- Technical guide through Vienna , published by the Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects, edited by Ing. Martin Paul (urban planning inspector), Gerlach & Wiedling publishing house, Vienna 1910
- Wilhelm Seledec, Helmut Kretschmer, Herbert Lauscha: Bathing and baths in Vienna , Europa Verlag GesmbH, Vienna 1987, ISBN 3-203-50995-4
- Christine Klusacek, Kurt Stimmer: The city and the electricity. Vienna and the Danube ; J & V, Edition Wien, Dachs Verlag, Vienna 1995, ISBN 3-85058-113-6 , p. 121 f.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Architects lexicon of the Architekturzentrum Wien
- ↑ 2000 years of baths in Vienna ( Memento of the original from July 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Neue Freie Presse daily newspaper , Vienna, No. 12.198, August 8, 1898, p. 5
- ↑ Allgemeine Sportzeitung , Vienna, July 24, 1898, p. 857, tenders
- ↑ Allgemeine Sportzeitung , Vienna, August 14, 1898, p. 955, swimming, results
- ↑ Wilhelm Seledec, Helmut Kretschmer, Herbert Lauscha (see literature)
- ↑ Website of the Viennese magazine News ( Memento of the original from February 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Report of the communal town hall correspondence , 1961 ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ State Treaty 1955
- ↑ daily newspaper Wiener Zeitung , Vienna, 2005
- ^ The new urban river baths in the Vienna Danube Canal - memorial sheet on the occasion of the opening of the first bath next to the Sofienbrücke , Vienna, 1904 (A 40974)
Coordinates: 48 ° 13 ′ 41.1 ″ N , 16 ° 24 ′ 10.8 ″ E