- Year 1897.
- Period: 26-04-1897 until beginning 05-1897.
- Address: Kartner Ring No. 7.
- District number: I.
- District name: Innere Stadt.
- Districts of Vienna.
Gustav Mahler stays at the hotel during his first assignment at the Vienna Opera House. Next to the State Opera
The Hotel Bristol opened in 1892 – at a building on the other side of the block. But the hotel soon extended “to grow into” today’s corner. Between 1916 and 1945, the Hotel Bristol was so large that it stretched the entire front of Kärntner Ring 1-7. During that time the hotel still boasted the Grill Room, a Titanic-style dining room. Neither the room nor the ship exists any longer. With its prominent address Kärntner Ring 1 today, the Hotel Bristol is the hotel next to the Vienna State Opera, with 150 rooms and suites.
The hotel was named after the British town Bristol. In Vienna it was disproved for the first time that the Bristol had been named after the fourth Earl of Bristol. The Earl lived some 100 years before the opening of Europe’s Bristol Hotels (Rome 1870, Warsaw 1901, Oslo 1920, Paris 1925 and some 50 more), his emblem was totally different from that of the town in Suffolk which has nothing to do with the Earl.
Bristol’s emblem depicts a castle and a ship. Bristol, after all, was the town from where many expeditions put out to sea. The original unicorns were displaced by lions in 1923. Later, in 1932 and 1975, the unicorns appeared again. Today, the emblem bears the lions once again. The motto Virtute et Industria, virtue and industriousness, can be read above our hotel’s entrance door; it is, in fact, the same motto that decorates the emblem of the town Bristol in England.
