350 dead people under the Nusel bridge. No one has ever kept accurate records
photo: Petr Kouba, PrahaIN.cz/A beautiful view of Prague’s Nusle district opens from the Gorlice viewpoint
Anyone who climbs Karlovy Vary to the New Town Walls and looks into the deep Nusel Valley will recognize that this place has always been a big problem for Prague. How to overcome him? How to get to Prague from the south?
Until the 19th century, pilgrims and merchants had to travel to the metropolis via Vyšehrad. They passed through all the local gates and then took a steep downhill path to the Výton area. Over the years, the access road (today’s Čiklova Street) changed to a road, and it was also possible to travel under today’s Congress Center.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a tunnel was dug under the Vyšehradská rock and a new connection with the city center was created. However, until the 1960s, the main route connecting the metropolis with the south of Bohemia, including freight traffic, still led through Vyšehrad.
The monuments at Vyšehrad were literally shaken to their foundations, so traffic had to be driven out of here in the 1960s. However, this hastened efforts to cross the Nuselsky Valley by bridge.
Visions of crossing the valley are even older
Not that the bridge wasn’t talked about much earlier. The first ideas about crossing the valley via the bridge date back to the end of the 19th century. Even when it was planned to excavate the Vyšehradská rock, this undertaking struggled with the fact whether it would be better not to build a bridge over the Nuselský údolí. That’s when common sense and, above all, less financial demands prevailed. This question only became relevant in 1922, when Prague changed to Velka Praha. However, it was not easy to get to a large part of the new cadastre. In addition, at that time, a strong residential development in the Pankrácká plain began to develop in the area, and it was simply not possible without a connection to the center.
Stanislav Bechyně, a legend among Czech experts in concrete, concrete and reinforced concrete constructions, became a great promoter of the construction of the bridge. He came up with his own design of a reinforced concrete bridge. His idea was that three reinforced concrete arches would arch over the Nusel Valley. He presented his bold idea to the public when the new Czechoslovak state was barely a few months old, and perhaps it was at that time, in that revolutionary ferment, that the project fell through.
Extravagant designs did not impress
In 1927, however, the transport crisis even prompted a public tender. The commission received almost three dozen proposals, but not a single one was selected for implementation. And that despite the fact that there were real gems among the proposals. An arched iron bridge similar to the one on the Výtona or a chain bridge or an extremely decorative turret bridge could have stood over the Nuselské údolí.
View of the bridge deck of the Nuselské bridge. photo: Petr Kouba, PrahaIN.cz
A new architectural competition was announced another five years later. However, her assignment had already been considerably modified. It also included the construction of an urban expressway on the lower floor of the bridge.
At that time, the contracting authorities envisioned the disparity between today’s rail transport and the subway under the term urban high-speed railway. Dozens of projects were submitted again, but the winner was not chosen and everything went back to ice.
II. the world war and the rise of socialism slowed down almost all projects, so it is logical that the bridge over the Nuselský údolí stopped being talked about completely.
The socialist boom forced builders to take action
However, in the 1960s, the construction of the Jižní Město housing estate complex was decided upon, and hundreds of thousands of new Prague residents definitely had to be connected to the center with a suitable thoroughfare. In addition, the construction of the Pankrácké plain has also progressed strongly.
The bridge project was the work of six architects and engineers – Robert Bucháček, Stanislav Hubička, Svatopluk Kobra, Vojtěch Michálek, Miroslav Sůra and Jan Vítek. The proposal assumed that the bridge would have six lanes, three in each direction, two sidewalks, and a high-speed tram would run in the lower part of the bridge.
The entire bridge was to be made of prestressed concrete. Roughly with these conclusions, the construction was approved. It was 1966 at the time, and the actual construction was supposed to start with the demo part of the Nuselské údolí development the following year.
A total of seventeen five-story buildings bounced off. In their place, the supports of gigantic structures had to grow. Dust from the rubble covered Nusle in 1967, and the events were captured not only by the news crews of the Czechoslovak Television, but also by the creative team of Zdeňko Podskalský, who used the footage in the film Our Czech Song.
The situation on the battlefield changes every day
But already in 1968, everything was different. The high-speed tram has given way. The Prague Spring did not only wish for more open politics, but also for bolder social projects. There was talk of a subway instead of a tram, and the bridge project had to be redesigned. The metro was heavier than the trams, and we are not talking about the different tracks and especially the way of supplying electricity. The difference in load suddenly threatened other buildings in the Nuselské údolí, where there was a risk that the bridge supports would have to be spaced more apart in order to distribute the weight evenly. Fortunately, this did not happen and people in Oldřichova, Jaromírova and Sekaninova streets could breathe a sigh of relief. The metropolis did not lose any more houses.
But instead of the subway, tanks arrived in Prague in 1968. And the Soviets soon explained to our Politburo that the Czechs should actually be grateful for the international aid and that we should forget about the Czech subway thanks to the Soviet one. And this despite the fact that the first cars of the domestic metro had already been manufactured long ago and were successfully tested at the Kačerov depot.
Part of the Nuselské bridge is the route of line C of the Prague metro. photo: Petr Kouba, PrahaIN.cz
But comrades from Ural, which produces everything bigger, heavier and more powerful. It was suddenly discovered that each carriage of the Soviet metro was twelve tons heavier, and the designers were suddenly full of worries again. How to save the bridge and increase its load capacity? A saving thought came. A steel grid attached directly to the reinforced concrete frame of the bridge was placed in the subway tube. This grid distributes the weight of the heavy Soviet monsters over the entire structure and will not be the most threatening. However, the grate itself weighs another 800 tons.
The inhabitants of the city were once again terrified of the tanks
In 1970, tanks returned to Prague again. This time, however, in order to carry out a load test of the bridge. These were 77 huge gigantic machines from the Rákovnice tank formation. They stood side by side on the bridge side by side. The structure didn’t even budge and the designers could relax.
The bridge was finished, but no access roads had been built to it. It was necessary to create both front fields. Unfortunately, this did not happen without further liquidations and demolitions. On the north side, where today’s highway divides into two one-way branches behind the bridge, the Children’s Hospital used to be. This Neo-Renaissance building was actually the first pediatric clinic in Austria-Hungary, but it did not survive the construction of the Nusel Bridge. Today, she is left with only a very sad memory. In Božena Němcová, we can find about five street meters of tram tracks embedded in the ground with a switch in the places where the former Karlov Children’s Hospital tram station was located.
There was minor damage on the southern forecourt. Only the Nusel footballers lost their space and turf here. Instead of frolicking on the green page, the leading representatives of the party and the state later spent their honeymoon here, because shortly afterwards the Palace of Culture, now the Congress Center, was built here.
The 485-meter-long bridge was inaugurated on February 22, 1973, as part of the Gottwald February Putsch celebrations. But at that time, the north-south highway on Pankrác had not been completed at all, so although cars could drive over the bridge, they could not reach it. This changed only on April 30 of the same year as part of the May Day celebrations, and of course, a day later, the May Day parade took place on most of the streets. On May 9, 1973, as part of the Red Army liberation celebrations, subway trains crossed the bridge. A new station was created, which had the same name as the entire bridge – Klement Gottwalda.
Today, when you stand in the Nuselské údolí and the bridge stands above you, you are filled with a sense of sacred reverence. The bridge is 26.5 meters wide. The supports of the bridge span two 68.5 meter long and three 115.5 meter long spans. The bridge floats above your head at a height of 42.5 meters. Although it is a stunning feeling from below, it is far from being the highest bridge in Prague. The Lochkovský one on the road circuit is almost twice as high above the valley.
When life sucks with you
The bridge gained great fame right from the opening among Czech suicides. The meter-high railing was not difficult to overcome. The modification of the bridge in 1990 did not help either, when a safety net was stretched under the railing. Even increasing the railing to 270 centimeters did not prevent people’s determination to commit suicide. Only the installation of a slippery and flexible metal sheet curled towards the road definitely helped.
Exact data on the number of suicides are not available, but approximately 350 people ended their lives by jumping from the bridge. Among them was, for example, the son of the famous singer, the golden nightingale Dalibor Janda.
According to Czech experts, the Nusel bridge became a transport structure of the 20th century. photo: Petr Kouba, PrahaIN.cz
In 2011, the artist Krištof Kintera created a monument called From own decision in memory of all suicides. However, among the people it is called the Suicide Lamp. It is a public lighting pole that is twisted and whose light does not shine down into Folimanka Park, but up onto the bridge.
The motif of jumping suicides also found its way into cultural works. In a non-depressing form, Janek Ledecký sang about him in the song Pěkná, pěkná, pěkná: “For your breath, I’ll jump backwards off the bridge that changes names…” The poet Jiří Žáček went even further, who wrote the Blues of Nuselský most. “Once again, someone jumped down from the bridge of horrors, finished his match, it doesn’t matter, he was said to be a nut and a master of caroms, already seventh in the order this year. Maybe calculate what life owes him and that the next time he fucks with him again, who would want to fall in a puddle when he can fly straight to the sky!’ Chansonist Renata Drössler sang the text in a wonderful way.
The Czechoslovak concrete legend Stanislav Bechyně even lived to see the opening of the Nusel bridge. He died a few months after the ceremonial ribbon cutting at the age of 86.
However, it did not live to receive the highest award, which the bridge, which has been called Nuselský since 1990, won in 2000. At that time, it was declared the Building of the Century in the category of Transport Structures.
Today it is an absolutely necessary attribute of the metropolis. More than 300,000 people pass through its bowels every day in subway cars. 160,000 vehicles and thousands of people cross the bridge every day, mainly tourists who cross its sidewalk. It can thus be said that during the busiest days, up to a million people a day will not show up without the Nusel Bridge.
The creation of this text was primarily based on the memory of the author, as well as the websites of the capital city of Prague, the city district of Prague 4, Wikipedia and the Prague – Unknown server.