Literature on the streets of Vienna

A last little vacation post.

Central Vienna has a lot of streets named after writers and composers. I'm just glancing at a map - there's Gottfried Keller, Grimmelshausen, Grillparzer, Schiller, Goethe. Over here is a cluster of philosophers - Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, along with Pestalozzi. Vienna is saturated in Mozart and Waltzing Strauss kitsch. But near the opera house, we also see streets named after Schubert, Mahler, Bruckner, Liszt, Lehár. Opera fans will enjoy a stroll down Nibelungengasse and Papagenogasse. The only visual artist I see memorialized with a street name is Canova. I'm probably missing some.

The street named after Mahler (the Bruckner and Keller streets, too) suggest that much of this naming was done, at the earliest, at the beginning of the 20th century. This was around the same time that, in Chicago, ethnic civic groups were installing statues in Lincoln Park honoring Hans Christian Andersen, Shakespeare, and Goethe. The Goethe memorial is actually a statue of the legendary hero Siegfried, along with a big eagle, which as far as I know has nothing specifically to do with Goethe, but that's no matter.

Everything has a history, even the naming of streets. To the extent that I have a point here, that's it. Also, American city planners working on new exurbs near Phoenix or Denver or wherever the new cities are appearing now should name a bunch of streets after Louisa May Alcott and Charles Ives and Henry James.