The Arbeitergasse and the bed renters

This street was already named after workers before any municipal housing existed, and the way those workers lived is the reason the rest of this walk is here at all.

 

In the Vienna of around 1900, a family rented a single room with a kitchen alcove, and to cover the rent that same family sublet a sleeping spot to a stranger. These bed renters paid for a mattress in shifts, so that at night someone different lay in the bed than during the day, and tens of thousands of Viennese lived exactly like this.

 

Water came from a single tap in the hallway shared by an entire floor, the bassena, and that hallway doubled as the place where the news of the whole block made its rounds. Tuberculosis was so common that doctors called it the Viennese disease.

 

When the city began building after the war, this was the picture the designers carried in their minds, and it explains why the new flats were allowed to be so small, because for anyone coming out of a room like that, forty square metres with a door of your own was a different life altogether.

 

We follow the street to the little square named after its springs.