Steffl Department Store, commonly referred to as Steffl, is a

department store A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store under one roof, each area ("department") specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, the department store mad ...

located on Kärntner Strasse in

Innere Stadt The Innere Stadt (; ; "Inner City") is the 1st municipal Districts of Vienna, district of Vienna () located in the center of the Austrian capital. The Innere Stadt is the old town of Vienna. Until the city boundaries were expanded in 1850, the I ...

Vienna Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

. It is named after the nearby

Stephansdom St. Stephen's Cathedral ( ) is a Roman Catholic church in Vienna, Austria, and the mother church of the Archdiocese of Vienna. It is the seat of the Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn. The current Romanesque and Gothic form of the ca ...

, which is sometimes known as "Steffl".

History

The M. Neumann Department Store, designed by

Otto Wagner Otto Koloman Wagner (; 13 July 1841 – 11 April 1918) was an Austrian architect, furniture designer and urban planner. He was a leading member of the Vienna Secession movement of architecture, founded in 1897, and the broader Art Nouveau mo ...

and built in 1895-1896, previously stood on the site of the current store. On 11–12 April 1945, the store caught fire during the

Vienna Offensive The Vienna offensive was an offensive launched by the Soviet 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts in order to capture Vienna, Austria, during World War II. The offensive lasted from 16 March to 15 April 1945. After several days of street-to-street figh ...

and was demolished in 1949 due to war-time damage. In 1949-50, Carl Appel built a new, nine-storey (from -1 to +7) development for the Neumann company, which has been known as the Steffl Department Store since 1961. Kärntner Strasse had not yet been pedestrianized at that time. On 1 May 1979, a fire was detected in the women's clothing department on the second floor and 900 m² of retail space went up in flames. The smell of burning was again detected during the clean-up process and police discovered an incendiary device with a time fuse. The following day, two other incendiary devices were discovered in a neighbouring department store. The "Erster Mai" (First of May) organisation described the attacks as protests against capitalism. The ownership structure of the store has changed several times in recent decades. The Konsum Österreich consumer cooperative indirectly became one of the temporary owners but shrank from a large company to a small business in 1995 due to a sensational collapse of their accounts. The store was completely renovated in the 1990s. In 2007, the businessman Hans Schmid acquired the property and the operating company. Since then, gradual remodeling and repositioning has begun and has already been completed on several levels. The total floor space comes to around 13,000 square meters. The department store is visited by up to 30,000 people per day. The top floor is home to the "Sky Bar" bar and restaurant. The only

Planet A planet is a large, Hydrostatic equilibrium, rounded Astronomical object, astronomical body that is generally required to be in orbit around a star, stellar remnant, or brown dwarf, and is not one itself. The Solar System has eight planets b ...

tax free office in the centre of Vienna is also located in the building.

Culture

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition and proficiency from an early age ...

composed

the Magic Flute ''The Magic Flute'' (, ), K. 620, is an opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. It is a ''Singspiel'', a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue. The work premiered on ...

and the

Requiem A Requiem (Latin: ''rest'') or Requiem Mass, also known as Mass for the dead () or Mass of the dead (), is a Mass of the Catholic Church offered for the repose of the souls of the deceased, using a particular form of the Roman Missal. It is ...

during the final year of his life in the small ''Kayserhaus'', which stood on the site up until the middle of the 19th century (at Rauhensteingasse 8, at the back of the current building). A memorial plaque commemorates Mozart's death on 5 December 1791.Mozart-Sterbehaus. In: Wien Geschichte Wiki istory of Vienna Wiki wien.at, 10 September 2014, retrieved on 12 October 2014.

References

External links

* {{Coord, 48.2064, N, 16.3717, E, source:wikidata, display=title Department stores of Austria Buildings and structures in Innere Stadt