Clearance of Josefov

The clearance of Josefov (asanace) was a large-scale redevelopment of the former Jewish Town and adjacent parts of the Old and New Town, made possible by the clearance laws of 1893.^[1] By 1914, 469 houses had been demolished, and the old lanes were replaced by a new street network centred on Mikulášská, today Pařížská Avenue.^[1] Of the original ghetto buildings, the Jewish Town Hall, the Old Jewish Cemetery and six synagogues remained.^[9]^*

1850: the Jewish Town becomes Prague's fifth quarter

In 1850 the Jewish Town was incorporated into Prague and named Josefov.^[6] It became Prague's fifth quarter alongside the Old Town, the New Town, the Lesser Town and Hradčany.^[4] The ghetto was densely built up because until its abolition Jews were not allowed to live outside its boundaries. After 1850 wealthier residents moved to more modern parts of the city and Josefov became a poor quarter. According to statistics from 1889, Jews made up only about one tenth of its population.^[3]

The reasons given for the clearance were sanitary conditions: contaminated well water, no sewerage and overcrowding. The low-lying land by the river was also flooded during the spring thaw, and cellars stayed damp all year.^[3] In a request dated 4 December 1883 the city council stated that between 1869 and 1880 the population of Prague fell by 1.2%, while in the six nearest suburbs it grew by 121%. In the same period 136 new buildings went up in Prague and 1,050 in the suburbs.^[2] On 28 March 1885 the city physician Jindřich Záhoř submitted a proposal to the municipal health council that Josefov and the lower part of the Old Town be demolished and rebuilt.^[2]

1882–1887: from a tax request to the "Finis Ghetto" competition

Preparations for the clearance began in 1882.^[1] On 20 September 1882 the board of municipal elders resolved to request a 30-year exemption from rent tax for new buildings and a 25-year exemption for rebuilt ones. On 6 March 1886 the city council sent a petition to the emperor. In December 1886 the Ministry of Finance promised a 20-year exemption for buildings that would be ready for use within ten years.^[2] At a confidential meeting on 17 December 1886 the clearance area was limited to Josefov, the flood-prone part of the Old Town and the Vojtěšská quarter of the New Town.^[2]

A public competition for the regulation plan was announced on 1 October 1886. The jury assessed five entries, and in February 1887 first prize went to the entry "Finis Ghetto" by Alfréd Hurtig, Matěj Strunc and Jan Hejda. The plans were exhibited for 14 days at the Old Town Hall.^[2] Hurtig's design envisaged demolishing almost all historic residential buildings of the entire Old Town except selected churches and public buildings.^[2] In March 1887 Jan Neruda wrote an ironic feuilleton about the exhibited plans for Národní listy.^[2]

11 February 1893: two imperial and two provincial laws

Emperor Franz Joseph I signed the clearance law for Prague in Vienna on 11 February 1893.^[5] The laws were promulgated as Nos. 22 and 23 of the Imperial Law Gazette and Nos. 23 and 27 of the Provincial Law Gazette and took effect on 7 April 1893.^[2] Law No. 22 defined the clearance area and gave the municipality of Prague the right of expropriation for ten years. Owners were to be called upon to bring their property into line with the adjustment plan within two years, otherwise expropriation followed. Law No. 23 exempted new buildings from house rent tax for 20 years, and the provincial laws added exemption from provincial, municipal and school surcharges.^[2]

According to ČT24, the clearance areas covered more than 380,000 m² and contained 608 houses.^[1] According to contemporary records, the Josefov and Old Town area measured 365,476 m², of which 92,984 m² lay in Josefov and 272,492 m² in the Old Town, and it included 584 houses with 1,793 owners. The New Town area measured 14,672 m² and had 18 houses.^[2] The main area was roughly bounded by the Vltava, today's Revoluční Avenue, Dlouhá Avenue and Platnéřská Street. The smaller New Town area lay between the Vltava and Ostrovní, Pštrossova and Myslíkova streets.^[1] The area was divided into 38 building groups marked with Roman numerals.^[2]

1893–1896: an office, a loan of 6 million gulden and the first expropriations

The clearance office of the Prague municipal authority began work on 16 March 1893.^[2] In August 1893 the city council received three offers to take over the expropriation right, among them one from the architect Jan Zeyer and two from Parisian bidders. None led to an agreement, and the council rejected Zeyer's offer in July 1894.^[2] On 28 November 1895 the board of municipal elders approved that the city would carry out the clearance itself and proposed a loan of 6 million gulden. Zemská banka was the only one of seven approached institutions to submit an offer, and on 10 August 1896 the city accepted it, for the time being at half the amount, 3 million gulden.^[2] On 14 January 1896 the city council stated that nothing needed to be done for the residents moved out of Josefov.^[2]

From 16 March to 21 May 1896 expropriation proceedings took place in groups XXX, XXXI, XXXV and XXXVI between Josefovská Street, Dušní Street, Old Town Square and Mikulášská. They concerned 65 houses with 249 owners, and the city paid 1,955,220 gulden for them.^[2] The first buildings demolished in the area were four houses at the corner of Platnéřská and Křížovnická streets between November 1895 and March 1896.^[2]

From October 1896: the first blocks and tours by candlelight

Partial demolition began in 1895, and large-scale demolition followed from October 1896.^[1] Work started where the new avenue meets Old Town Square.^[3] At the end of October 1896 the city council invited tenders for demolishing the first 28 houses, 15 of them in Maislova Street. The Ústřední matice školská organised paid tours of the emptied houses, and on Sunday 6 December 1896 more than 2,000 people took part.^[2] Demolition ended on 1 April 1897, and 21,700 cartloads of rubble were taken mainly to Bubny to fill the flood plain at Maniny.^[2] The second group of 21 houses lay between Úzká, Josefská, Dušní and Dlouhá streets and Old Town Square and included the dissolved Benedictine monastery at St Nicholas. Tours on 27 and 30 May 1897 attracted 2,165 people.^[2]

By 1897, 54 houses had been demolished in the first four groups. The sale of 42 building plots was announced in June 1897, but the city received no offers.^[2] The first completed buildings in this part of the area were two houses of the merchant František Šír, Nos. 934 and 935, on the north side of Old Town Square, finished in 1897. Around the turn of 1898 and 1899 the Provincial Committee tried to save the neighbouring houses Nos. 931, 932 and 933. On 27 January 1899 the city council decided to demolish them, and they were pulled down in spring 1899.^[2] According to a report of 20 February 1903 by August Stein, head of the clearance office, the city had by then demolished 128 houses, owners had demolished another 22, and 67 new buildings stood in the area.^[2]

469 houses by 1914

The laws were originally meant to apply for ten years. In April 1903 they were extended for another ten years, and the same happened in 1913, 1923 and 1933, with validity until 7 April 1943.^[1] The 1903 extension was enacted by laws Nos. 88 and 96 of the Imperial Law Gazette and Nos. 45 and 46 of the Provincial Law Gazette, and the new phase was financed by a loan of 10 million crowns from Zemská banka.^[2]

The largest interventions took place by 1914, when a total of 469 houses had been demolished: 247 in Josefov, 198 in the Old Town and 24 in the New Town.^[1] During both world wars the clearance stagnated. In the 1920s and 1930s it concentrated on the eastern edge of the Old Town area between Dlouhá, Hradební, Haštalská, U Obecního dvora and Řásnovka streets, where the clearance plan was never completed.^[2]

Three synagogues out of nine

Of the nine synagogues in Josefov, three disappeared during the clearance.^[1] The New Synagogue from the late 16th century in today's Široká Street was demolished in 1898. The Velkodvorská Synagogue from the early 17th century stood at the end of today's Pařížská Street, on the site of the open space in front of the Hotel Intercontinental, and was demolished in 1902. The Cikánova Synagogue of 1613 in Bílkova Street was demolished in 1906.^[1] The Klausen Synagogue was preserved.^[10] In 1906 the Jubilee Synagogue was built in Jeruzalémská Street.^[1]

The Maisel Synagogue lost its former prominent position and received the neo-Gothic appearance designed by Alfred Grotte, which it keeps to this day.^[11] In 1903 the Jewish community had to cede part of the Old Jewish Cemetery for a new street, today's 17. listopadu. The exhumed remains were reburied on the Nefele mound in front of the Klausen Synagogue.^[16] In 1906–1908 the Burial Society built a ceremonial hall designed by Jan Gerstl and Alois Gabriel.^[14]

What disappeared

The New Synagogue, demolished 1898; the Velkodvorská Synagogue, demolished 1902; the Cikánova Synagogue, demolished 1906.^[1]
Rabínská, Meislova, Střelná, Červená and Masařská streets.^[1]
Hřebenářská and Poštovská streets (called Fialková from 1870), covered by the northern part of Pařížská Avenue.^[4]
The small square by Valentinská Street, considered the oldest square on the right bank of the Vltava, which disappeared around 1900.^[4]
Svatojánské náměstí on the embankment by Pařížská Avenue, which became a street, and the Boršov court.^[4]
House No. 16/I in Kaprova Street, owned in the 14th century by Bishop Jan of Středa, demolished in 1909.^[4]
The Krenn House, which blocked the view of St Nicholas Church from Old Town Square.^[1]
Houses Nos. 931, 932 and 933 on the north side of Old Town Square, demolished in spring 1899.^[2]
The old stamp office building, No. 922/I, in Dlouhá Avenue, which could not be saved.^[2]
The old buildings of the Vojtěšská quarter in the New Town, demolished around 1900.^[4]
Part of the Old Jewish Cemetery, ceded in 1903 to 17. listopadu Street.^[16]

What remained

Six synagogues: Old-New, Pinkas, Maisel, Klausen, High and Spanish.^[9]
The Old-New Synagogue, whose central part was completed around the 1270s and 1280s.^[19]
The Pinkas Synagogue of 1535, the second oldest surviving synagogue in Prague.^[13]
The Klausen Synagogue of 1694, the largest synagogue of the former ghetto.^[10]
The Spanish Synagogue of 1868, built on the site of the Old School demolished in 1867.^[12]
The Jewish Town Hall, No. 25 in Maiselova Street, from 1763–1765, with a clock with a Hebrew dial.^[5]
The Old Jewish Cemetery, used for burials from 1439 to 1787, with more than 12,000 gravestones.^[15]
St Adalbert's Church with its parsonage and bell tower in the Vojtěšská quarter.^[4]

Mikulášská Avenue: from clearance street to Pařížská

The new quarter was to be crossed by a representative residential and commercial avenue inspired by the Paris boulevards and the Vienna Ringstrasse.^[3] In 1901 it was named Mikulášská in honour of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II. After several further changes it has been called Pařížská since 8 December 1947.^[4] The city sold the cleared and prepared plots to building contractors, who built blocks of houses in styles ranging from historicism to Art Nouveau.^[3] Houses on the new avenue were designed by, among others, Rudolf Kříženecký, Jan Koula, Alois Dlabač, Rudolf Koukola and František Buldra.^[4]

All building plots in groups XXX, XXXI, XXXV, XXXVI, IX and XXXIII were sold by the end of 1902.^[2] Kaprova Street was entirely rebuilt after the clearance by architects of the early 20th century.^[4] Tall apartment buildings rose around the Jewish Town Hall, mostly around 1900, so that its 27.5 m turret no longer stands out among them.^[5] The New Town area in the Vojtěšská quarter was built up in the first decade of the 20th century.^[2]

Disputes: the Easter Manifesto, Bestia triumphans and the Club for Old Prague

On 18 March 1893 the art historian Karel Chytil proposed in Národní listy that houses slated for demolition be surveyed and photographed beforehand.^[2] On 13 June 1893 the city council approved the establishment of a commission for the inventory of monuments. The commission had only an advisory vote. At its initiative, Jindřich Eckert's photographic documentation of the ghetto, 150 watercolours by Václav Jansa and a set of oil paintings by Jan Minařík were produced. The watercolours and paintings are held by the Museum of the City of Prague.^[2]

On 5 April 1896 Národní listy published the manifesto "To the Czech People!", known as the Easter Manifesto, whose text was written by Vilém Mrštík.^[2] It was signed by, among others, Alois Jirásek, Otokar Březina, F. X. Šalda, Mikoláš Aleš and Josef Václav Myslbek.^[1] In November 1896 the city council set up an Art Commission of architects, including Josef Zítek and Jan Koula. On 12 November 1897 the council rejected its proposed changes to the clearance plan, and on 23 February 1898 the commission resigned.^[2]

In 1897 Mrštík published the essay Bestia triumphans with a cover by Zdenka Braunerová.^[7] He borrowed the title from Friedrich Nietzsche.^[1] At a meeting on 20 March 1897 city councillor Karel Černohorský responded to the essay in Rozhledy by proposing to demolish St Wenceslas Church at Zderaz. After the Art Commission resigned, Mrštík wrote a second essay of the same name in 1898.^[2] At a student assembly in the Carolinum on 27 November 1898 a proclamation to the Czech people was read, and on 16 April 1899 a mass meeting was held on Žofín.^[2] There Luboš Jeřábek called for a change to the building code in favour of legal protection of historic buildings.^[7]

The Club for Old Prague (Klub Za starou Prahu) was founded on 28 January 1900. The club names Vilém Mrštík as the spiritual father of its idea.^[8] According to the Prague 1 district, opposition from the cultural public prevented further demolition that was to affect the Old Town and the Lesser Town.^[4] The club's chair Kateřina Bečková told ČT24 in 2013 that the protests were directed not against the clearance of Josefov but against demolition in the Old Town and the Lesser Town. In her words, Josefov was then recognised as a neglected quarter that had to be cleared.^[1] In her study she also notes that many demolitions in the Old Town and the Lesser Town in the same period were carried out not by the city but by private owners.^[2]

1906: a museum from the objects of demolished synagogues

In 1906 the Association for the Foundation and Maintenance of a Jewish Museum in Prague was formed under the leadership of Salomon Hugo Lieben and August Stein. The immediate impulse was the threat to several synagogues and prayer houses.^[17] The association rescued part of the liturgical objects from the Cikánova, Velkodvorská and New synagogues. At the municipal authority, August Stein was in charge of property settlements with owners of houses in the clearance area.^[17] The first exhibition opened in 1909 in Benediktská Street, and in 1926 the museum moved to the ceremonial hall by the Old Jewish Cemetery.^[17]

The appearance of the quarter before the clearance is preserved in Antonín Langweil's paper replica of Prague, which he began in 1826 and worked on for eleven years. On roughly 20 m² it shows more than two thousand buildings at a scale of 1:480, including hundreds of demolished houses of the Jewish Town and the Old Town. It is on display at the Museum of Prague.^[18]

Today

According to the Jewish Museum, the surviving monuments of Josefov form the best-preserved ensemble of Jewish monuments in Europe.^[9] According to the city portal, the remaining buildings were not destroyed even during the Nazi occupation, because the Nazis intended them as an open-air museum of an extinct Jewish civilisation.^[6] On 21 July 1971 the historic core of Prague, including Josefov, became a heritage reserve covering 866 hectares.^[20] On 14 December 1992 the Prague Heritage Reserve was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the Historic Centre of Prague.^[21]

Chronology

1850: the Jewish Town is incorporated into Prague as Josefov.^[6]
20 Sep 1882: the board of municipal elders requests tax relief for new buildings.^[2]
28 Mar 1885: city physician Jindřich Záhoř proposes demolishing Josefov.^[2]
1 Oct 1886: competition for the regulation plan announced; "Finis Ghetto" wins in February 1887.^[2]
11 Feb 1893: the emperor signs the clearance law.^[5]
7 Apr 1893: laws Nos. 22 and 23 of the Imperial Law Gazette take effect.^[2]
13 Jun 1893: commission for the inventory of monuments established.^[2]
November 1895: first demolition at the corner of Platnéřská and Křížovnická.^[2]
5 Apr 1896: the Easter Manifesto in Národní listy.^[2]
October 1896: large-scale demolition begins.^[1]
1897: Mrštík's Bestia triumphans.^[7]
23 Feb 1898: the Art Commission resigns.^[2]
1898: the New Synagogue is demolished.^[1]
Spring 1899: houses Nos. 931–933 on Old Town Square are demolished.^[2]
28 Jan 1900: the Club for Old Prague is founded.^[8]
1901: the new avenue is named Mikulášská.^[4]
1902: the Velkodvorská Synagogue is demolished.^[1]
1903: the laws are extended by ten years; the Old Jewish Cemetery is reduced.^[1]
1906: the Cikánova Synagogue is demolished, the Jubilee Synagogue is built, the Jewish museum association is founded.^[1]^[17]
1914: a total of 469 houses demolished.^[1]
7 Apr 1943: the clearance laws expire.^[1]
8 Dec 1947: Mikulášská Avenue renamed Pařížská.^[4]
21 Jul 1971: the Prague Heritage Reserve is declared.^[20]
14 Dec 1992: the Historic Centre of Prague is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.^[21]

Summary

The clearance laws were in force from 7 April 1893 to 7 April 1943.^[1] The areas, covering more than 380,000 m², contained 608 houses. By 1914, 469 of them had been demolished, 247 of these in Josefov.^[1] Of the nine synagogues in Josefov, three disappeared and six remained, together with the Town Hall and the Old Jewish Cemetery, which was reduced in 1903.^[1]^[9] On the site of the demolished buildings arose Mikulášská, since 1947 Pařížská Avenue, with houses in styles from historicism to Art Nouveau.^[3]^[4] The clearance gave rise to the commission for the inventory of monuments, the Club for Old Prague and the Jewish Museum in Prague.^[2]^[8]^[17] Since 1971 the area has been a heritage reserve and since 1992 part of the UNESCO World Heritage.^[20]^[21]

Sources

* The sources are collected and the preliminary text of this entry is drafted with artificial intelligence, on the instruction of the editorial staff; the entry has not yet been verified by an editor — report a mistake.