City Center

Like many cities in Europe, today's Innsbruck is a collection of communities that were independent for a long time. Wilten, Pradl, Hötting, Amras and Arzl were all only incorporated into the city centre in the course of the 20th century. What we understand today as the city centre corresponds to the suburbs of Innsbruck before the expansions of the last two decades of the 19th century. If you look at city maps from around 1880, you can see that Saggen, Reichenau, O-Dorf and the west of Innsbruck were sparsely populated, if at all. The centre of the city was formed by the old town, which was bordered by the city wall, the Neustadtthe area of today's Maria-Theresienstraße, Museumstraße up to the railway station as well as Mariahilf and St. Nikolaus north of the Inn.

The Neustadttoday's Maria-Theresien-Straße was acquired by Innsbruck from Wilten Abbey in 1281 to make room for the hospital, the poor relief centre and a cemetery. These institutions had once again found space within the city walls and found favour with the citizens. The first residential buildings outside the confines of the city walls were also built in the 13th century. The Neustadt grew rapidly. From the 16th century onwards, when Innsbruck became the residence of the Tyrolean sovereigns, baroque palazzi were eagerly built for the aristocracy and other influential members of society. Aristocrats had to have at least a secondary residence close to the powerful if they were to be taken seriously. From the Neustadt the Adelsgasse. A new class established itself alongside the old nobility in the early modern period. Commoners who served the sovereigns as deserving civil servants, and later also military officers, were elevated to the lower nobility. Later came the so-called moneyed nobility, successful citizens who, thanks to their economic power, could afford prestigious palazzi even without a title of nobility, which the old nobility was often no longer able to maintain under the new rules of industrialisation after 1848. Many of these houses have survived to this day, albeit in the renovated form of the 19th century. Palais Lodron, for example, was the residence of Innsbruck's mayor Wilhelm Greil after his father bought the building.

The street between the old town and Triumphpforte gradually became a business and shopping district. Zambra's department stores', today's Kaufhaus Tyrol, marked the beginning. In 1857, Johann Peterlongo founded a gun factory, from which a hunting equipment shop would emerge and, after the First World War, a sports shop under the management of his son.

For a long time, today's town centre was surrounded by agricultural areas. On city vedutas between 1500 and 1900, one can observe how new streets developed from here. Between the time of Maximilian and the end of the 17th century, various rulers turned the area between the Congress Centre, the Hofgarten and the Kettenbrücke bridge into part of the city with their projects. The Silbergasse, today's Universitätsstraße, connected Dreiheiligen with the Zeughaus to the city centre. In 1453, this area was transferred from Wilten Abbey to the city of Innsbruck in a settlement. The man-made Sill Canal provided the businesses of early Innsbruck industrialisation with much-needed water for power generation. While the Silbergasse was home not only to commercial enterprises and craft workshops but also to the monasteries that were gradually founded, the area to the north-east of the city centre in front of the Hofburg was the entertainment district for the aristocracy's casual city life. The theatre and court gardens developed here.

After 1800, the city centre grew to the west towards the new clinic and to the east towards the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum and the new railway station. The entire city centre changed significantly during the 19th century. Department stores, theatres, cinemas, cafés, dance halls and museums were built as a sign of the general broader prosperity and upswing.

While many of the old palaces can still be admired in Maria-Theresien-Straße, the facades of the Gründerzeit buildings can be seen in Museumstraße and Anichstraße. Beda Weber described the incipient growth of the city first-hand in 1851:

"... in the space between the Neustadt, the Franziskanergraben and the Universitätsgasse, a new city quarter is laid out, on the eastern side of which, on the other side of the small Sill on the meadows, called the Neuraut, the station for the Munich-Salzburg railway is located. The museum building in the street of the same name is located in this neighbourhood."

Many buildings were destroyed by the air raids during the Second World War. Some of the gaps were filled with unattractive post-war buildings. The car-centred policies of the 1960s and 1970s also left their mark, as can still be seen on Bozner Platz. The reorientation of Maria-Theresienstraße as a pedestrian zone took place in 2009 after long discussions dating back to the 1980s. The conversion of the Rathauspassage and the opening of Kaufhaus Tyrol transformed Innsbruck's city centre. Innsbruck became the hip Innsbrooklyn. In the meantime, even the most energetic opponents of this change find it inconceivable to return to the old, traffic-laden state, as the old Neustadt has really blossomed. Bars and shops are transforming it into Innsbruck's promenade. The city centre is slowly but surely transforming from a hostage to traffic back into a public space for everyone.