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By Root 124 0

suburb and is today a largely unremarkable neighborhood of apartment buildings, but along the northward horizon blooms a clock tower, the midsection of which is an open-air spiral staircase that for over a century has stood against the blue sky like a massive strand of dangling DNA. The tower belongs to the grandest building within Výstavišt, the nineteenth-century exhibition grounds that lie along the tram tracks at the northern end of Holešovice. The grounds and buildings were constructed for Prague’s 1891 Jubilee Industrial Exhibition, which was the closest the city ever got to hosting a World’s Fair. While the clock tower was inspired by Eiffel’s slightly earlier Parisian triumph, it tops an expansive wrought-iron and glass exhibition building that combines the onion domes of Greek Orthodoxy, the airiness of classic European train stations, and the whimsy of the pre-modern amusement park. There is no other building like it in all of Prague—Prague architecture, while often beautiful, is never this fun— and on the typically gray days that define Prague’s winters the building rises before its viewer like a mirage.

During the turbulent and gloomy century that followed the optimism of Výstavišt’s construction, the novelty of the exhibition hall’s size probably spared it from falling into decrepitude: large buildings are uncommon enough in Prague that this one proved useful. In the early days of the Communist regime Výstavišt played host to various Communist congresses. With the advent of capitalism it has become Prague’s equivalent of a convention center.

Výstavišt also serves as an unlikely boundary between the pre- and post-twentieth-century incarnations of what people think of when they think of the word park. In the United States, the traditional park—the green kind—tends to be kept at a safe distance from the kind featuring rollercoasters and bumper cars. Amusement parks lie off highway exit ramps or in back lots behind shopping malls. A respectful distance is maintained between their whir and thump and the green islands that amend urban and suburban grids. But here, Prague mixes its milk with its meat, its dessert with its dinner. West of Výstavišt lies peaceful Stromovka, a green expanse of trees and paths that for centuries was the private hunting preserve of kings and emperors. East of Výstavišt lies Lunapark, the result of Coney Island being run through a blender, reflected in a funhouse mirror, and roughly translated into Czech.

THE FLOOD OF 2002 subsumed Stromovka Park and now it is a ruined beauty. The sticky mud that once covered everything is gone but the park’s trees bear witness to the river’s rise: water rings encircling trunks memorialize the river’s surreal height. Below the rings the trunks are strangely pale, less the color of bark than the complexion of a convalescent after a long illness.

An old building manifests its longevity in the details of its construction, but an old park hides its age. No signs or plaques announce Stromovka Park’s origins. Stromovka’s trees are tall and thick-trunked, but neither the trees nor the park’s sloping landscape suggests that Stromovka is seven hundred years old. Only Stromovka’s recent ruination provides evidence of its antiquity. In the 1500s, the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II transformed Stromovka from a royal park into a hunting preserve, stocking the grounds with four thousand animals and constructing an artificial pond. An underground canal was built to channel river water from the Vltava to feed this imperial fishing hole, an engineering feat ingenious for the sixteenth century and catastrophic for the twenty-first. Holešovice lies opposite the river from the district of Karlín and was not as hard hit by the flood, but Rudolf’s underground canal faithfully channeled the Vltava’s rising waters into the pond, swallowing the park whole. Six months after the water’s subsidence, there is nothing to implicate the pond except the trees: the ones closest to its banks wear the highest water rings.

In the wake of the flood, Stromovka was closed to visitors but now