Hacking, Vienna — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Hacking?

The Dominikanerinnenkonvent at Schloßberggasse 17 is the heaviest thing here, its convent church, its Gymnasium and its priest house all sharing one address in the federal monument list. Villa Schmeidler holds Schloßberggasse 14. Villa Bauer stands further west at Auhofstraße 230, among the Gründerzeit houses that followed the Westbahn and its Hütteldorf station of 1858, and the Rudolf Steiner Schule occupies Seuttergasse 29-33.

Two small entries close the list: the Bildstock Lilienberggasse, a wayside shrine, and the Zufferbrücke, the footbridge on which the old Hackinger Freiheit reaches over the Wienfluss into the 14th district. The Himmelhof is often named alongside these. Its own record puts it in Ober Sankt Veit, on the far side of the boundary.

What is the history of Hacking?

The name enters the record in 1156, taken from Markward of Hacking, a follower of the Babenberg margrave Heinrich II who was made duke of Austria that same year. The village grew at the foot of the castle hill and strung itself out along the Auhofstraße as far as the Nikolaikapelle at the wall of the Lainzer Tiergarten; the Veste above it burned in the Turkish campaign of 1529 and was never rebuilt. In 1823 the village held 110 people.

The 1890 census counted 1,244 people in 107 houses, and two years later Hietzing swallowed the place whole. A boundary redrawn in 1938 then cut the result in two, sending the southern half of Bahnhof Wien Hütteldorf and the industrial ground east of it to Penzing. The Hackinger Mühle at Deutschordenstraße 1-3 went with them, and stands in Penzing on Hacking cadastral land.

The sanatorium that stood here reopened as the St. Josef Krankenhaus Wien on 19 October 1930, and works under that name still. Maxim Galitzenstein, later a film producer, was born here in 1886, and the poet Max Mell moved in during 1919.

Where is Hacking?

Hacking takes the right bank of the Wienfluss at the western rim of Vienna, with Hütteldorf over the water to the north, Ober Sankt Veit to the east and the wall of the Lainzer Tiergarten closing the southwest. The Hackinger Kai runs beside it, carrying the western approach road along the river.