The old Jewish quarter across the Danube Canal, emptied in 1938 and slowly, complicatedly, alive again.
Leopoldstadt is the second district, on the island between the Danube Canal and the Danube. It was Vienna’s Jewish quarter — a ghetto from 1625, cleared by Leopold I in 1670, and from the nineteenth century the district where a large part of the city’s Jewish population lived. By the 1930s Vienna had over 180,000 Jews and this is where the greatest concentration of them was. It was called Mazzesinsel, matzo island.
After the Anschluss in March 1938 the community was expelled, dispossessed and murdered. Around 65,000 Austrian Jews were killed. What remained afterwards was a district with its population removed.
Now
The Karmeliterviertel — the small quarter around Karmeliterplatz — has become one of the more interesting parts of Vienna over the last twenty years. There is a small but genuine Jewish community again, with kosher bakeries and butchers on Hollandstraße and Große Mohrengasse, and a synagogue.
Alongside it there are galleries, cafés, natural wine bars and design studios, in the way that under-priced central districts go. It is gentrifying and the arguments about that are the usual ones.
The market
The Karmelitermarkt is a proper neighbourhood market, small, with a Saturday farmers’ market that is the best in Vienna — producers from Lower Austria and Burgenland, and stalls that do breakfast. It is the reason to come on a Saturday morning.
The Augarten
To the north-west, a walled Baroque park of 1775 with the oldest formal garden in Vienna, the Augarten porcelain manufactory (founded 1718, second-oldest in Europe, with a factory tour), and the Vienna Boys’ Choir’s concert hall and school.
It also holds two of the six flak towers built in 1944 — vast windowless concrete anti-aircraft fortresses, too solid to demolish safely, still standing in the middle of the park. There are two more in Arenbergpark and two in Esterházypark, one of which houses an aquarium. They are the most physically undeniable thing the war left in Vienna and there is no getting away from them.
The canal
The Danube Canal embankment along the district’s edge is lined with graffiti, temporary bars on the water and a cycle path, and in summer it is where the city drinks outdoors. It is a fifteen-minute walk from Schwedenplatz.
