The Giant Ferris Wheel & Wurstelprater
Why is it significant?
Tilt your head back. Above you the Riesenrad, the Giant Ferris Wheel, turns so slowly you almost have to stare to see it move, its red cabins hanging from a web of steel spokes. Around it, the Wurstelprater shrieks and glitters: roller coasters, ghost trains, carousels and the smell of fried dough.
Key Facts
| Place | The Giant Ferris Wheel & Wurstelprater |
|---|---|
| Address | Riesenradplatz 1, 1020 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.21670, 16.39590 |
| Part of Walk | The Island Across the Canal: Vienna's Leopoldstadt, Augarten and Prater |
| Generated | Generated |
Tilt your head back. Above you the Riesenrad, the Giant Ferris Wheel, turns so slowly you almost have to stare to see it move, its red cabins hanging from a web of steel spokes. Around it, the Wurstelprater shrieks and glitters: roller coasters, ghost trains, carousels and the smell of fried dough.
The wheel was built in 1897 by the English engineer Walter Basset for an amusement park called Venice in Vienna, complete with canals and gondolas. It stands about sixty-five metres tall, and for a while it was one of the largest wheels in the world. Most of the giant wheels of that age, in London, Paris and Chicago, were torn down long ago. This one is still turning.
It nearly did not survive. In the last days of the war in 1945, the wheel caught fire and its cabins burned. It was repaired with only half of its original cabins, fifteen instead of thirty, and that is how it still looks today.
Then came the film that made it immortal. In The Third Man, from 1949, shot in the ruins of a Vienna divided between four occupying powers, Orson Welles as the racketeer Harry Lime rides this wheel with his old friend. From the top he looks down at the people below, tiny as dots, and asks whether it would really matter if one of them stopped moving. Then he delivers his famous cynical speech about the Borgias and Swiss cuckoo clocks, a line Welles is said to have written himself.
And why Wurstelprater? Not because of sausages, though there are plenty, but after Hanswurst, the clown of old Viennese popular theatre, whose puppet shows entertained crowds here. It all goes back to 1766, when Emperor Joseph II threw open the Prater, until then an imperial hunting ground, to the people of Vienna. Now walk past the wheel to the long straight avenue of chestnut trees that begins just beyond it.