The Founding Plane of Rathauspark

The oldest tree in front of Vienna's City Hall is older than the building itself by exactly one century. This plane went into the ground in 1783, when the site was still open land on the edge of the city, decades before anyone had drawn up plans for a Rathaus or the park now named after it. Construction of the neo-Gothic town hall did not start until 1872, and the park was landscaped around the new building only after that, which means this tree had already been growing for close to ninety years by the time the space around it became a park at all. It has since grown into a trunk six metres around and a crown thirty metres tall, big enough that Vienna's own tree registry lists it, under catalogue number 252, as Rathauspark's oldest specimen without qualification. It is one of three plane trees in the park with individual legal protection as natural monuments, granted in 1973. Office workers on lunch break, tourists cutting through on their way to the Burgtheater, and the occasional wedding photographer all pass beneath a canopy that was already mature when Mozart was writing his last symphonies, in a park that did not exist yet to contain it.