Vienna, beating the odds: "A livable city is a city where people live because they want to, not because they have to."

May Day parade in Vienna, 1987.

In the early 1980s I commenced a love affair with Vienna, and my visits there always have been rewarding. History was an enticement back then, but the more time I spent in Vienna, the greater my fascination with the present day.

Seldom is an article printed in its entirety; I hope CityLab doesn't mind, as it is critical to view an example of how it doesn't have to be the way we do it here.

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Secrets of the World’s Most Livable City, by David Dudley (CityLab)

Viennese lawmaker Maria Vassilakou explains why the Austrian capital ranks so high on quality-of-life rankings, despite its rapidly growing population.

If you’ve seen any “Most Livable City” ranking lists, you know Vienna: The Austrian capital is a perennial champion of these popular annual listings of places said to boast a notably enviable quality of life, based on factors like safety, health and education scores, access to transit and green space, cultural amenities, cost of living, and so forth. The real value of such rating exercises may be up for debate, but it’s hard to argue with Vienna’s utter dominance of the Municipal Livability Bowl.

“We must be doing something right,” said Maria Vassilakou, the city’s former deputy mayor. In her comments at this year’s CityLab DC conference, the Austrian Green Party lawmaker offered a crash course in assembling the good life, Viennese-style—beginning with how her city defines the L-word itself.

“A livable city is a city where people live because they want to, not because they have to,” Vassilakou said. That translates into an emphasis on children and families, and making sure that the city can accommodate their needs: “A city that is good for children is good for everybody.”

Those needs are growing: Vienna, a city of about 2 million, is adding about 25,000 new residents annually, and adds about 13,000 new units of housing to accommodate them. “We have to build a small town each and every year,” Vassilakou told the audience. But unlike in many North American cities, population growth isn’t coming in the form of suburban-style sprawl and an unaffordable central city, thanks to strict land-use codes and serious government subsidies for housing. About half the city is reserved for green space, she said, and 62 percent of the population, including a broad middle class, lives in social housing.

This housing-as-a-human-right emphasis is a key element in the city’s vaunted livability. The Viennese social housing model is a century-old tradition that endures despite population pressure from immigrants and political turmoil from the rise of the far-right national Freedom Party; it’s often invoked by affordability advocates in other cities as the gold standard in public housing. Many subsidized units are owned directly by the government, and rent control assures that housing costs remain a relatively modest share of residents’ annual income, especially compared to costly capitals like London or Washington, D.C.

The housing part of Vienna’s livability story in complemented by another important factor—the ease and affordability of transportation. Residents are served by one of Europe’s more comprehensive public transit systems, a network of subway, buses, and trams that residents can access for a flat annual fee of €365. And most do. “Close your eyes and imagine that, for one euro a day, you could go anywhere you want, as often as you want to, using public transit,” said Vassilakou. More than 73 percent of the city’s daily mobility needs are covered by modes outside of private cars.

As in so many other European cities, Vienna is actively seeking to further expand car-free options, via a host of pedestrianization projects that render the tidy and already-storybook-like capital even more charming. Most prominently, Mariahilfer Strasse—the city’s longest shopping street—went car-free in 2015.

Similar efforts to keep cars at bay in Paris and London have not been universally welcomed by residents, however, and Vienna is no exception. To overcome opposition, Vassilakou counseled bringing residents into the decision-making process. In Vienna, one way that happens is with a community grant scheme that bestows hundreds of modest €4,000 grants for small neighborhood-level public-space improvement projects. “Once one of these initiatives gets implemented, it changes the perspective of the whole neighborhood,” Vassilakou said. “I think this works because this is not top-down. It’s the bottom-up kind of inspiration that can change the city.”

Vienna’s unique approach to urban problem-solving has not rendered it immune from economic segregation and social inequality, but it has certainly helped mitigate some of the usual ill effects of growth. Considering how often it serves as a model for its peer cities, perhaps Vienna’s proper superlative is “most teachable.”

Our annual May Daze observance puts the workers back into Hauss Square -- I mean, no labor union donations for Gahan eh?

This essay is reprinted or linked yearly, attesting to my eagerness to remind you that on May Day, while the Louisville area eschews productive labor and focuses its partying proclivities on the ponies, most of the rest of the world takes a holiday amid thoughts about the nature of work itself.

Thanks to the wonders of digitalization, there's now a stand-alone post for photos of the Vienna May Day celebration in 1987.

For more vague linkages, see Hunter's Double D and Seattle Slew Kabobs, please.

Three years have passed, and still 2016 remains a tough act to follow. It may have been the finest season ever for personal May Day celebrations.

For one thing, Bernie Sanders was running for president that year. As an independent senator and avowed socialist, the fact that Sanders even exists in the American political non-spectrum is as good an introduction as any to the "real" international workers' holiday.

As an added bonus, we weren't in America at all when May 1, 2016 rolled around. Rather, it was the occasion of our Spring Break in Estonia, and two big surprises during a day trip to Helsinki: Kim Andersen's presence and a delightful though short left-wing May Day parade.

Now that Pints&union exists, and we put our first May Day to bed today, perhaps the tradition of May Day parades can be restored to eternally somnolent New Albany in 2020. One time around a city block would suffice to start. I'm sure Develop New Albany stands ready to get on board with this idea, just as long as they can promote tacos.

The Economist offers a short but entertaining briefing: Fire, flowers, fertility: summer’s here.

For many people May 1st is synonymous with Labour Day, but the date also signifies the onset of summer in the northern hemisphere.

Let the Commie festivities begin!

---

ON THE AVENUES: May Daze.

By the summer of 1987, when I first visited the geopolitical conglomeration formerly known as the Soviet Union, the country’s annual May Day parade in Moscow had long since ceased to be a showcase of international socialism.

Rather, it had reverted to the overt, and was staged as an ideological pageant of nationalistic fervor – a genuine, old-fashioned, patriotic flag-waver for Mother Russia.

For the bedrock Soviet worker, who according to prevailing mythology was the chief beneficiary of international socialism, May Day’s single biggest selling point was being able to avoid the drudgery of the factory for a few precious hours. He’d have rather been on the beach at a posh Black Sea resort in Bulgaria, but what could be done?

At least for a while he could forget about the dystopian Five Year Plan by hopping the subway from his cookie-cutter, high-rise suburb to the historic center of the city, queuing with fellow vodka-bearers, plodding behind the massive missiles through cobblestoned Red Square, and then finally passing the reviewing stand arranged atop Lenin’s Mausoleum for a fleeting glimpse of the jowly old men in furry caps, grimacing arthritically as they waved vacantly into space.

The parade was a choreographed set piece, of course, one fraught with symbolic properties, both for natives seeking clues to the direction of their country apart from the stultifying daily propaganda, and for observers elsewhere, like professional Kremlinologists in the employ of Western intelligence agencies.

These consulting spooks subsequently would examine film of the May Day parade, reshuffle their tea leaves, and strain them through a few hoary apocryphal algorithms. Passwords would be repeated, reports submitted, meetings held, and murmured decisions reached.

In appropriately clandestine fashion, money would be exchanged, and a hush briefly might descend, until suddenly, somewhere in the world, a legally elected government was overthrown – first one of the Capitalist paymasters’ choosing, then another selected by the Communists, each in its own turn, serving the dual purpose of preserving the status quo, and stimulating both full erections and full employment among participating secret agents.

---

Long before the decade of the 1980’s, the workers of the world – be they in Akron, Cape Town or Tashkent – already understood that they neither had become united, nor shed their chains in any fashion sufficient to exercise control over the means of production.

The stewards of the world’s two great economic “-isms” had divided the planet into manageable spheres of influence, with the non-aligned throngs always ripe for recruitment and exploitation. At the end of a day’s toil, the best way for just plain folks to endure the enforced pieties of a May Day parade -- or a 4th of July picnic -- was to remain under the influence.

As Ernest Hemingway reminds us, the bottle is a blessed means of sovereign action. You first drink from it, and then throw it in the direction of the oppressor. In cases of rotgut, you can drink some of it, and then set the remainder aflame just prior to tossing (see “cocktails, Molotov”).

During the Cold War, Russians and Poles chose vodka. Cubans opted for rum. I always imagined the Czechs and Hungarians to be more fortunate than most, seeing as they possessed beer (Pilsner Urquell) and wine (Egri Bikaver) of a higher uniform quality than produced by Warsaw Pact neighbors.

For Americans, there’d be gallons of insipid ice cold light lager and a few pints of Jack Daniels. Choices from our NATO allies might have ranged from English cask bitter to ouzo in Greece, and from schnapps (Germany) to cider (Spain).

It goes to show that as opiates go, booze is vastly preferable to religion.

---

To recap, May Day takes place on May 1, and generally refers to springtime public holidays in the northern hemisphere, where the cultural tradition began long before Marx, Engels and Gus Hall.

For more than 125 years, May Day also has been considered International Workers' Day, which we Americans eventually chucked to another time on the calendar (Labor Day, at summer’s end) so as to avoid confusion with the Commies. Why? Labor and left-wing political movements first established May 1 as International Workers’ Day in memory of those who were killed and wounded during the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, which took place in Chicago.

In all my trips to Europe, only once did I find myself in position to physically attend a May Day parade. It was in Vienna, in 1987. I got up early and walked into the city center from my hostel across from Westbahnhof, finding a comfortable place to stand along the Ringstrasse near City Hall.

The various unions, workplaces and numbered districts each were represented, and at the end, after the sanctioned social elements had marched past, there were series of menacing, piggybacking trailers: Anarchists, Maoists, random radicals and even a mob of hooded Muslim extremists.

Ah yes, I remember it well. Afterwards, I splurged on schnitzel and local draft beer, reflecting on the way that America’s customarily oblivious exceptionalism has detached its labor holiday from the rest of the world’s.

It’s too bad.

For us.

Our annual May Daze observance puts the workers back into Walpurgis.

This essay is reprinted or linked yearly, attesting to my eagerness to remind you that on May Day, while the Louisville area eschews work and focuses its partying proclivities on the ponies, most of the rest of the world takes a holiday amid thoughts about the nature of work itself.

Thanks to the wonders of digitalization, there's now a stand-alone post for photos of the Vienna May Day celebration in 1987.

For more vague linkages, see Hunter's Double D and Seattle Slew Kabobs, please.

The year 2016 is a tough act to follow. It may have been the finest season ever for personal May Day celebrations.

For one thing, Bernie Sanders was running for president last year. As an independent senator and avowed socialist, the fact that Sanders even exists in the American political non-spectrum is as good an introduction as any to the "real" international workers' holiday.

As an added bonus, we weren't in America at all when May 1, 2016 rolled around. Rather, it was the occasion of our Spring Break in Estonia, and two big surprises during a day trip to Helsinki: Kim Andersen's presence and a delightful though short left-wing May Day parade.

If Ainslie's Tavern comes into being by May 1, 2018, perhaps the tradition of May Day parades can be restored to eternally somnolent New Albany. One time around a city block would suffice to start. I'm sure Develop New Albany stands ready to get on board with this idea.

The Economist offers a short but entertaining briefing: Fire, flowers, fertility: summer’s here.

For many people May 1st is synonymous with Labour Day, but the date also signifies the onset of summer in the northern hemisphere.

Let the Commie festivities begin!

---

ON THE AVENUES: May Daze.

By the summer of 1987, when I first visited the geopolitical conglomeration formerly known as the Soviet Union, the country’s annual May Day parade in Moscow had long since ceased to be a showcase of international socialism.

Rather, it had reverted to the overt, and was staged as an ideological pageant of nationalistic fervor – a genuine, old-fashioned, patriotic flag-waver for Mother Russia.

For the bedrock Soviet worker, who according to prevailing mythology was the chief beneficiary of international socialism, May Day’s single biggest selling point was being able to avoid the drudgery of the factory for a few precious hours. He’d have rather been on the beach at a posh Black Sea resort in Bulgaria, but what could be done?

At least for a while he could forget about the dystopian Five Year Plan by hopping the subway from his cookie-cutter, high-rise suburb to the historic center of the city, queuing with fellow vodka-bearers, plodding behind the massive missiles through cobblestoned Red Square, and then finally passing the reviewing stand arranged atop Lenin’s Mausoleum for a fleeting glimpse of the jowly old men in furry caps, grimacing arthritically as they waved vacantly into space.

The parade was a choreographed set piece, of course, one fraught with symbolic properties, both for natives seeking clues to the direction of their country apart from the stultifying daily propaganda, and for observers elsewhere, like professional Kremlinologists in the employ of Western intelligence agencies.

These consulting spooks subsequently would examine film of the May Day parade, reshuffle their tea leaves, and strain them through a few hoary apocryphal algorithms. Passwords would be repeated, reports submitted, meetings held, and murmured decisions reached. In appropriately clandestine fashion, money would be exchanged, and a hush briefly might descend, until suddenly, somewhere in the world, a legally elected government was overthrown – first one of the Capitalist paymasters’ choosing, then another selected by the Communists, each in its own turn, serving the dual purpose of preserving the status quo, and stimulating both full erections and full employment among participating secret agents.

---

Long before the decade of the 1980’s, the workers of the world – be they in Akron, Cape Town or Tashkent – already understood that they neither had united, nor shed their chains in any fashion sufficient to exercise control over the means of production.

The stewards of the world’s two great economic “-isms” had divided the planet into manageable spheres of influence, with the non-aligned throngs always ripe for recruitment and exploitation. At the end of a day’s toil, the best way for just plain folks to endure the enforced pieties of a May Day parade -- or a 4th of July picnic -- was to remain under the influence.

As Ernest Hemingway reminds us, the bottle is a blessed means of sovereign action. You first drink from it, and then throw it in the direction of the oppressor. In cases of rotgut, you can drink some of it, and then set the remainder aflame just prior to tossing (see “cocktails, Molotov”).

During the Cold War, Russians and Poles chose vodka. Cubans opted for rum. I always imagined the Czechs and Hungarians to be more fortunate than most, seeing as they possessed beer (Pilsner Urquell) and wine (Egri Bikaver) of a higher uniform quality than produced by Warsaw Pact neighbors.

For Americans, there’d be gallons of insipid ice cold light lager and a few pints of Jack Daniels. Choices from our NATO allies might have ranged from English cask bitter to ouzo in Greece, and from schnapps (Germany) to cider (Spain).

It goes to show that as opiates go, booze is vastly preferable to religion.

---

To recap, May Day takes place on May 1, and generally refers to springtime public holidays in the northern hemisphere, where the cultural tradition began long before Marx, Engels and Gus Hall.

For more than 125 years, May Day also has been considered International Workers' Day, which we Americans eventually chucked to another time on the calendar (Labor Day, at summer’s end) so as to avoid confusion with the Commies. Why? Labor and left-wing political movements first established May 1 as International Workers’ Day in memory of those who were killed and wounded during the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, which took place in Chicago.

In all my trips to Europe, only once did I find myself in position to physically attend a May Day parade. It was in Vienna, in 1987. I got up early and walked into the city center from my hostel across from Westbahnhof, finding a comfortable place to stand along the Ringstrasse near City Hall.

The various unions, workplaces and numbered districts each were represented, and at the end, after the sanctioned social elements had marched past, there were series of menacing, piggybacking trailers: Anarchists, Maoists, random radicals and even a mob of hooded Muslim extremists.

Ah yes, I remember it well. Afterwards, I splurged on schnitzel and local draft beer, reflecting on the way that America’s customarily oblivious exceptionalism has detached its labor holiday from the rest of the world’s.

It’s too bad.

For us.

Celebrating a century since the apex of Vienna's modernist era.

The Family, by Egon Schiele.

Since my first visit to Vienna in 1985, I've been hooked.

Just let me rent a nice apartment in the Karl-Marx-Hof (one of many public housing units in Wien), and I'm golden.

A whirl through Vienna's modernist era, 100 years on, by Alice Fisher (The Guardian)

Celebrating a century at the heart of the modernist movement, the Austrian capital is putting on quite a show

If you need a push to visit Vienna, here it is: 2018 marks a century since the end of the city’s modernist era. To celebrate the creative output of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and many others, Austria’s capital will host a huge number of exhibitions this year.

Fin-de-siècle Viennese culture was the envy of the liberal world. This year is the 100th anniversary of the deaths of four of the movement’s leading lights: painters Klimt and Schiele, architect Otto Wagner and graphic artist Koloman Moser – though there were many others, too. Between 1890 and 1914 Austria was a gorgeous melting pot of ideas. The city was buoyed by the wealth of the Habsburg Empire – those guys loved a baroque palace, there’s one on pretty much every street corner. Alongside them lived Jewish immigrants who had new money and full civil rights. This equality meant that they could build avant-garde houses, commission interesting artists and run salons where progressive politicians and establishment figures met and mingled with psychoanalysts, writers and painters.

This unique period deserves to be celebrated ...

The American Bar, designed by Adolf Loos in 1908.
Photo from the article.

Today's Gahan-Free-Zone: "Public Housing Works: Lessons from Vienna and Singapore."

I try not to miss any opportunity to publish a photo of the blocks-long Karl-Marx-Hof apartment building in Vienna. It's public housing, according to Vienna's unique scheme.

When can we leave? "Vienna Offers Affordable and Luxurious Housing."

Here's a comparison of public housing in Vienna, Singapore and (briefly) New York City. I've cut to the conclusion, but the whole piece is worth reading.

Public Housing Works: Lessons from Vienna and Singapore, by Anna Bergren Miller (Shareable)

Lessons

Neither Vienna’s nor Singapore’s affordable housing programs are perfect. Yet both have achieved a level of success, measured in terms of both quantity and quality, that remains elusive for most American cities. What distinguishes these two models is their broad definition of social housing. In the United States, public housing is essentially crisis management. It offers temporary support to households who would not be able to afford housing without municipal assistance. Vienna and Singapore take a longer view, in the belief that offering subsidies to a majority of residents will benefit both society and the economy. As a result, the Viennese and Singaporean governments consistently invest both money and political capital in affordable housing, without fear of disrupting private housing market.

An effective affordable housing program benefits both residents and the community at large. Research demonstrates [pdf] that access to high-quality housing improves resident health incomes by reducing exposure to stressors and acting as a point of delivery for health care services. Affordable housing can also support residents' education [pdf], by preventing disruptions associated with residential mobility. On a community level, the construction and maintenance of public housing provides jobs and boosts the local construction industry. In addition, affordable housing supports the local economy by leaving residents with more disposable income. Affordable housing located near businesses provides employers with workers more likely to be productive, and less likely to move because they are overspending on housing.

Beyond the practical considerations lies a moral dilemma. Where Vienna and Singapore understand affordable housing as a right, American public housing programs—rhetoric aside—treat affordability as a privilege. If the latter is acceptable, then more of the same will work just fine. If not, it is time to move affordable housing from the periphery to the center of municipal policy.

30 years ago today: May Day in Vienna, 1987.

Previously: 30 years ago today: (April 30) A return to Vienna.

---

Day 16 ... Friday, May 1
Vienna. May Day parade, Schönbrunn w/John Bridie Murphy

Prior to arriving in Vienna, it genuinely had not occurred to me that the city's annual May Day parade would be worth watching. After all, for various reasons my proposed itinerary kept changing. I might have been visiting any number of locales on May 1, not necessarily Vienna.

But I got lucky. Outside of the Soviet bloc, there couldn't have been a finer place to experience the international workers' holiday than the Austrian capital. I've written about the May Day concept oft times before, and repeat the boilerplate here.

---

By the summer of 1987, when I first visited the geopolitical conglomeration formerly known as the Soviet Union, the country’s annual May Day parade in Moscow had long since ceased to be a showcase of international socialism.

Rather, it had reverted to the overt, and was staged as an ideological pageant of nationalistic fervor – a genuine, old-fashioned, patriotic flag-waver for Mother Russia.

For the bedrock Soviet worker, who according to prevailing mythology was the chief beneficiary of international socialism, May Day’s single biggest selling point was being able to avoid the drudgery of the factory for a few precious hours. He’d have rather been on the beach at a posh Black Sea resort in Bulgaria, but what could be done?

At least for a while he could forget about the dystopian Five Year Plan by hopping the subway from his cookie-cutter, high-rise suburb to the historic center of the city, queuing with fellow vodka-bearers, plodding behind the massive missiles through cobblestoned Red Square, and then finally passing the reviewing stand arranged atop Lenin’s Mausoleum for a fleeting glimpse of the jowly old men in furry caps, grimacing arthritically as they waved vacantly into space.

The parade was a choreographed set piece, of course, one fraught with symbolic properties, both for natives seeking clues to the direction of their country apart from the stultifying daily propaganda, and for observers elsewhere, like professional Kremlinologists in the employ of Western intelligence agencies.

These consulting spooks subsequently would examine film of the May Day parade, reshuffle their tea leaves, and strain them through a few hoary apocryphal algorithms. Passwords would be repeated, reports submitted, meetings held, and murmured decisions reached. 

In appropriately clandestine fashion, money would be exchanged, and a hush briefly might descend, until suddenly, somewhere in the world, a legally elected government was overthrown – first one of the Capitalist paymasters’ choosing, then another selected by the Communists, each in its own turn, serving the dual purpose of preserving the status quo, and stimulating both full erections and full employment among participating secret agents.

Long before the decade of the 1980’s, the workers of the world – be they in Akron, Cape Town or Tashkent – already understood that they neither had united, nor shed their chains in any fashion sufficient to exercise control over the means of production.

The stewards of the world’s two great economic “-isms” had divided the planet into manageable spheres of influence, with the non-aligned throngs always ripe for recruitment and exploitation. At the end of a day’s toil, the best way for just plain folks to endure the enforced pieties of a May Day parade -- or a 4th of July picnic -- was to remain under the influence.

As Ernest Hemingway reminds us, the bottle is a blessed means of sovereign action. You first drink from it, and then throw it in the direction of the oppressor. In cases of rotgut, you can drink some of it, and then set the remainder aflame just prior to tossing (see “cocktails, Molotov”).

During the Cold War, Russians and Poles chose vodka. Cubans opted for rum. I always imagined the Czechs and Hungarians to be more fortunate than most, seeing as they possessed beer (Pilsner Urquell) and wine (Egri Bikaver) of a higher uniform quality than produced by Warsaw Pact neighbors.

For Americans, there’d be gallons of insipid ice cold light lager and a few pints of Jack Daniels. Choices from our NATO allies might have ranged from English cask bitter to ouzo in Greece, and from schnapps (Germany) to cider (Spain).

It goes to show that as opiates go, booze is vastly preferable to religion.

To recap, May Day takes place on May 1, and generally refers to springtime public holidays in the northern hemisphere, where the cultural tradition began long before Marx, Engels and Gus Hall.

For more than 125 years, May Day also has been considered International Workers' Day, which we Americans eventually chucked to another time on the calendar (Labor Day, at summer’s end) so as to avoid confusion with the Commies. Why? Labor and left-wing political movements first established May 1 as International Workers’ Day in memory of those who were killed and wounded during the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, which took place in Chicago.

In all my trips to Europe, only once did I find myself in position to physically attend a May Day parade. It was in Vienna, in 1987. I got up early and walked into the city center from my hostel across from Westbahnhof, finding a comfortable place to stand along the Ringstrasse near City Hall.

The various unions, workplaces and numbered districts each were represented, and at the end, after the sanctioned social elements had marched past, there were series of menacing, piggybacking trailers: Anarchists, Maoists, random radicals and even a mob of hooded Muslim extremists.

Ah yes, I remember it well. Afterwards, I splurged on schnitzel and local draft beer, reflecting on the way that America’s customarily oblivious exceptionalism has detached its labor holiday from the rest of the world’s.

It’s too bad.

For us.

---

In closing, this link from 2013 is encyclopedic and highly recommended.

How Vienna Does Labor Day (And We Should Too), by Lisa (My Blue Danube)

Eventually — so very eventually — we arrive at the Rathaus simultaneous with the districts coming in the opposite direction (the Ring is a circle, after all). We alternate turning into the Rathausplatz, where a giant crowd cheers from behind barricades, and the mayor awaits on a viewing stand ...

... After you leave the Rathausplatz, directly across the Ring is the “Red Market,” that is, a pop-up outdoor cafe for drinking giant quantities of beer and wine — and liberally populated by firefighters, who are a prominent presence at May Day festivities

My 1987 photos follow in chronological order.

On Sunday, May 3, there was an epic hike across the city and an afternoon at the Prater amusement park. A night train brought me to Firenze (Florence), Italy on Monday morning.

Next: Florence and quality time in Italy.

30 years ago today: (April 30) A return to Vienna.

At Schönbrunn Palace.

Previously: 30 years ago today: An April interlude in Interlaken and the Swiss road to Vienna.

---

Day 15 ... Thursday, April 30
Wien (Vienna). City sightseeing

Day 16 ... Friday, May 1
Vienna. May Day parade, Schönbrunn w/John Bridie Murphy

Day 17 ... Saturday, May 2
Vienna. Military museum, Belvedere. Saw John off

Day 18 ... Sunday, May 3
Vienna. Epic hike; Prater. → Night train to Firenze (Florence)

My second-ever visit to Vienna began with an early Thursday morning arrival from Zurich at the Westbahnhof station, just a few minutes from the Hostel Ruthensteiner.

To me, those halcyon early Vienna days are inseparable from the Ruthensteiner, an unaffiliated youth hostel founded in 1968 (!) by a native of the city and his wife from Pittsburgh, whom he had married after attending college in the States. The hostel was a rooted oasis of calm, friendly and efficient helpfulness, certainly one of the finest businesses of its type that I ever encountered while traveling.

With the Ruthensteiner family's younger generations now in charge, the hostel remains alive, well and open for business in 2017, with a 50th birthday coming in 2018 – and as old at it might seem, this still isn't as long as Emperor Franz Joseph reigned (1848 - 1916, or 68 years).

These days, the low season special for a bunk bed in a dorm room is a mere 10 Euros, or circa $12 U.S. The high season price was about $8 during my stay in 1985. That’s not bad, allowing for inflation and the passage of time.

In 1987, on Thursday night, I was occupying a bunk in just such a dorm room and was awakened in the middle night by some of the most cacophonous snoring I'd ever heard, although to say I  felt this snoring in my ribs is more like it.

Groggily concluding that a very large animal was in its death throes, you can imagine my surprise the following morning upon learning that the perpetrator was an older man (probably in his mid-50s), charming, genial and slight of stature.

His name was John Bridie Murphy, and he was a hoot. Snoring aside, we coincided for parts of two days, roaming and seeing the sights. John was one of the first persons I'd ever met who spoke freely about his undiagnosed learning disabilities, and how they hampered him in some ways but impelled achievement in others. He'd made some money shuffling papers, but thought of himself as an artist.

Seeing as Vienna is filled to the brim with art (which he knew) and history (my specialty), the basis of our camaraderie should be obvious.

In ensuing years, we exchanged cards and letters for a while. I'll never forget his inscription on one of them: "We are kindred spirits!" It finally tapered off, and a few years ago I thought to google John Bridie Murphy of Newbury (or Newburyport) Massachusetts, uncovering a relatively recent obituary.

John apparently had a wonderful life. Rest in peace, sir, and thanks for the good times in Vienna way back when.

Insofar as how I experienced the city in 1987, there isn't a great deal to add from 1985, with the obvious exception of the May Day parade, which merits a chapter of its own. These articles from my 1985 travelogue provide partial background of my fascination with the city and its Habsburg offerings.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

From the moment I saw Vienna for the first time, stepping off the train from Venice into Sudbahnhof station, changing money and buying a transit pass, a steadily evolving fascination with the history of the Habsburg dynasty kept percolating in the back of my mind.

John and I visited the military museum so I could commune with Franz Ferdinand.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

The history of the Habsburgs was a major reason for my visit to Vienna in 1985, with the single most important objective being the city’s military history museum, appropriately located in a complex of 19th-century buildings called the Arsenal. I wanted to learn more about Franz Ferdinand’s life, and chose to begin with his death.

In 1987, I knew little of Stefan Zweig, but eventually learned.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 12 … Stefan Zweig and his world of yesterday.

Stefan Zweig’s name seldom appears in lists of important 20th-century writers, and yet between the two world wars, he was prolific, and a veritable monolith of the written word. He wrote poetry, plays, fiction, biographies and newspaper commentaries, which were translated into numerous languages and sold all across the planet.

I took few photos apart from the parade. During frequent visits to Vienna in the years to follow, I'd come to understand the appeal of the city's obscure byways and nooks, but in 1987, this was a learning curve still under development, and my focus tended toward the grandiose tourist attractions ... though not always.

The Rathaus (city hall; left) and Burgtheater (right). The twin spires to the rear rise from the Votivkirche (church).

One of the gates to the sprawling Hofburg Palace complex in downtown Vienna. Until 1918, the Hofburg was the nerve center of the Habsburg dynasty.

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library), with Heldenplatz (Heroes Square) in the foreground. Interestingly, the library includes a Museum of Esperanto and Collection of Planned Languages.

As for the equestrian statues, the one closest to the viewer in the first photo is Archduke Charles of Austria, from around 1860. The second photo in greater detail is Prince Eugene of Savoy (1865).

St. Stephen's Cathedral dominates the innermost Altstadt. Like much of Vienna, is was heavily damaged during WWII, but subsequently restored.

Just a few miles removed from the Hofburg, Schönbrunn Palace was the "summer camp" retreat of the Habsburg dynasty. As the photo of me at the top of the page clearly shows, it has long since ceased to be a rural vicinity.

The Belvedere Palace always has been a personal favorite, and is put to good use as a museum.

The two Belvedere palaces were built in the early eighteenth century by the famous Baroque architect Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt to be used as the summer residence of Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736). One of Europe’s most stunning Baroque landmarks, this ensemble – comprising the Upper and Lower Belvedere and an extensive garden – is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today the Belvedere houses the greatest collection of Austrian art dating from the Middle Ages to the present day, complemented by the work of international artists such as Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Max Beckmann. Highlights from the holdings Vienna 1880–1914 are the world’s largest collection of Gustav Klimt’s paintings (including the famous golden Art Nouveau icons the Kiss (Lovers) and Judith) and works by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. Key works of French Impressionism and the greatest collection of Viennese Biedermeier art are further attractions on display at the Upper Belvedere.

I'd noticed this mysterious Pilsner Urquell sign during my 1985 walks, and found it again in 1987. Only now have I thought to ask the Austrian beer writer Conrad Seidl what it was, and whether it still exists. He doesn't know, but is investigating.

Not to neglect this antique neon touting the original Budweiser (brewed in then-Czechoslovakia).

The WWII Soviet memorial still stands amid regular calls to dismantle it.

It is the most obvious landmark on the Schwarzenbergplatz, sandwiched between Palais Schwarzenberg and the Hochstrahlbrunnen fountain, a relic from WWII: The Soviet memorial „Heldendenkmal der Roten Armee". In Vienna, there are several slang terms for it: Looter′s Memorial, Memorial of the Unknown Rapist or "Erbsendenkmal" (pea memorial).

Public housing in Vienna was another topic that fascinated me at the time, although I didn't entirely understand the concept until later. Inscriptions like this were (and probably remain) on virtually every block in the neighborhoods.

These folks looked like they were out for an evening on the town, and while I took this photo solely because of the Gösser Bier sign in the distance, now it seems more atmospheric and richly detailed than that. It's a slice of life, and I wonder where these people are now?

Finally, a universal pictogram suitable for all languages.

Next: May Day in Vienna, 1987.

Our annual May Daze observance puts the workers back into Walpurgis.

This essay is reprinted or linked yearly, attesting to my eagerness to remind you that on May Day, while the Louisville area eschews work and focuses its partying proclivities on the ponies, most of the rest of the world takes a holiday amid thoughts about the nature of work itself.

For more vague linkages, see Hunter's Double D and Seattle Slew Kabobs, please.

The year 2016 is a tough act to follow. It may have been the finest season ever for personal May Day celebrations.

For one thing, Bernie Sanders was running for president last year. As an independent senator and avowed socialist, the fact that Sanders even exists in the American political non-spectrum is as good an introduction as any to the "real" international workers' holiday.

As an added bonus, we weren't in America at all when May 1, 2016 rolled around. Rather, it was the occasion of our Spring Break in Estonia, and two big surprises during a day trip to Helsinki: Kim Andersen's presence and a delightful though short left-wing May Day parade.

If Ainslie's Tavern comes into being by May 1, 2018, perhaps the tradition of May Day parades can be restored to eternally somnolent New Albany. One time around a city block would suffice to start. I'm sure Develop New Albany stands ready to get on board with this idea.

The Economist offers a short but entertaining briefing: Fire, flowers, fertility: summer’s here.

For many people May 1st is synonymous with Labour Day, but the date also signifies the onset of summer in the northern hemisphere.

Let the Commie festivities begin!

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ON THE AVENUES: May Daze.

By the summer of 1987, when I first visited the geopolitical conglomeration formerly known as the Soviet Union, the country’s annual May Day parade in Moscow had long since ceased to be a showcase of international socialism.

Rather, it had reverted to the overt, and was staged as an ideological pageant of nationalistic fervor – a genuine, old-fashioned, patriotic flag-waver for Mother Russia.

For the bedrock Soviet worker, who according to prevailing mythology was the chief beneficiary of international socialism, May Day’s single biggest selling point was being able to avoid the drudgery of the factory for a few precious hours. He’d have rather been on the beach at a posh Black Sea resort in Bulgaria, but what could be done?

At least for a while he could forget about the dystopian Five Year Plan by hopping the subway from his cookie-cutter, high-rise suburb to the historic center of the city, queuing with fellow vodka-bearers, plodding behind the massive missiles through cobblestoned Red Square, and then finally passing the reviewing stand arranged atop Lenin’s Mausoleum for a fleeting glimpse of the jowly old men in furry caps, grimacing arthritically as they waved vacantly into space.

The parade was a choreographed set piece, of course, one fraught with symbolic properties, both for natives seeking clues to the direction of their country apart from the stultifying daily propaganda, and for observers elsewhere, like professional Kremlinologists in the employ of Western intelligence agencies.

These consulting spooks subsequently would examine film of the May Day parade, reshuffle their tea leaves, and strain them through a few hoary apocryphal algorithms. Passwords would be repeated, reports submitted, meetings held, and murmured decisions reached. In appropriately clandestine fashion, money would be exchanged, and a hush briefly might descend, until suddenly, somewhere in the world, a legally elected government was overthrown – first one of the Capitalist paymasters’ choosing, then another selected by the Communists, each in its own turn, serving the dual purpose of preserving the status quo, and stimulating both full erections and full employment among participating secret agents.

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Long before the decade of the 1980’s, the workers of the world – be they in Akron, Cape Town or Tashkent – already understood that they neither had united, nor shed their chains in any fashion sufficient to exercise control over the means of production.

The stewards of the world’s two great economic “-isms” had divided the planet into manageable spheres of influence, with the non-aligned throngs always ripe for recruitment and exploitation. At the end of a day’s toil, the best way for just plain folks to endure the enforced pieties of a May Day parade -- or a 4th of July picnic -- was to remain under the influence.

As Ernest Hemingway reminds us, the bottle is a blessed means of sovereign action. You first drink from it, and then throw it in the direction of the oppressor. In cases of rotgut, you can drink some of it, and then set the remainder aflame just prior to tossing (see “cocktails, Molotov”).

During the Cold War, Russians and Poles chose vodka. Cubans opted for rum. I always imagined the Czechs and Hungarians to be more fortunate than most, seeing as they possessed beer (Pilsner Urquell) and wine (Egri Bikaver) of a higher uniform quality than produced by Warsaw Pact neighbors.

For Americans, there’d be gallons of insipid ice cold light lager and a few pints of Jack Daniels. Choices from our NATO allies might have ranged from English cask bitter to ouzo in Greece, and from schnapps (Germany) to cider (Spain).

It goes to show that as opiates go, booze is vastly preferable to religion.

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To recap, May Day takes place on May 1, and generally refers to springtime public holidays in the northern hemisphere, where the cultural tradition began long before Marx, Engels and Gus Hall.

For more than 125 years, May Day also has been considered International Workers' Day, which we Americans eventually chucked to another time on the calendar (Labor Day, at summer’s end) so as to avoid confusion with the Commies. Why? Labor and left-wing political movements first established May 1 as International Workers’ Day in memory of those who were killed and wounded during the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, which took place in Chicago.

In all my trips to Europe, only once did I find myself in position to physically attend a May Day parade. It was in Vienna, in 1987. I got up early and walked into the city center from my hostel across from Westbahnhof, finding a comfortable place to stand along the Ringstrasse near City Hall.

The various unions, workplaces and numbered districts each were represented, and at the end, after the sanctioned social elements had marched past, there were series of menacing, piggybacking trailers: Anarchists, Maoists, random radicals and even a mob of hooded Muslim extremists.

Ah yes, I remember it well. Afterwards, I splurged on schnitzel and local draft beer, reflecting on the way that America’s customarily oblivious exceptionalism has detached its labor holiday from the rest of the world’s.

It’s too bad.

For us.