Börse: the Former Vienna Stock Exchange
Why is it significant?
Stop in front of a long palace of red brick trimmed with pale stone, with arched windows, corner pavilions and a stately entrance. This is the former Vienna Stock Exchange, and its colour even has a nickname in town, Hansen red, after the same Danish architect who built the parliament.
Key Facts
| Place | Börse: the Former Vienna Stock Exchange |
|---|---|
| Address | Schottenring 16, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.21570, 16.36640 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Ringstrasse: The Grand Boulevard That Replaced the City Walls |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop in front of a long palace of red brick trimmed with pale stone, with arched windows, corner pavilions and a stately entrance. This is the former Vienna Stock Exchange, and its colour even has a nickname in town, Hansen red, after the same Danish architect who built the parliament.
It was planned in boom times. In the 1860s and early 1870s Vienna went wild for shares: railway companies, banks and building societies, many of them financing the Ringstrasse itself. Then, on 9 May 1873, barely a week after the World Exhibition opened in the Prater, the market collapsed. Black Friday wiped out fortunes within hours, banks failed, and a wave of suicides followed. Liberal confidence never fully recovered, and the resentment of the ruined was soon exploited by antisemitic politicians. That summer cholera broke out, and the visitors the exhibition had counted on stayed away.
So Hansen's exchange, built between 1874 and 1877, opened into the long depression that followed the crash. Many of the families who built palaces along the Ring were Jewish bankers and industrialists, the Ephrussi, the Todesco, the Epstein, and their salons and patronage became part of the city's culture. That world ended in 1938 with confiscation, flight and murder.
In 1956 a fire gutted the great trading hall. The facades survived and the interior was rebuilt, and the trading of shares has long since moved onto screens and away from the old floor. Restored, the building has found new uses, but the facade still tells the story of a city that bet everything on its own future.
The street is called Schottenring after the Schottenstift, the Scots Abbey a few steps inside the old town, founded in the twelfth century by monks who were in fact Irish... medieval Latin called Ireland Scotia. Follow the Ring downhill towards the Danube Canal, where the boulevard finally meets the water.