The postcard shows the view from the Piata Unirii (Ringplatz, Central Square) uphill into the Strada Regina Maria (Rathausstrasse, vul. Holovna). This street is part of the main North-South axes of the town, originally called Lemberger Strasse. Its the oldest and most important road in the Bukowina, the so called “Reichsstraße” (Imperial Road) coming from Lviv (Lemberg) in the north, going towards the southern Bukowina to Suceava (Suczawa) and from there westwards ascross the Carpathian mountains into Siebenbürgen (Transylvania).
The corner on the right edge of the postcards belongs to the Town Hall, built in 1848. The central building used to be the Hotel Belle Vue in the Austrian times before the Banca de Est moved in in the Romanian period. It stands at the entrance of Strada Jancu Flondor (Herrengasse), the most fancy boulevard of the city, today named after the Ukrainian poet Olga Kobylianska. The building with the little tower next to it was built in 1898 and called house Zu den drei Kronen, after one of the first hotels situated on that site in 1786. It housed one of the most fancy Cafes, called Cafe Habsburg in the Austrian era and Cafe Grand in Romanian times.
The house in front of the little tower dates back to the first half of the 19th c. when a ‘first generation’ of stone houses was built in the Ringplatz (Central square). Only in the 1930s, when the whole building was taken over by a bank, it was raised by one storey. Today it houses the local office of the Ukrainian National Bank.
The postcard shows the Kiosk and stop of the streetcar (in those days called tramway in Chernivtsi) built in the 1930s. The tramway track shown on the postcard is the line number 1 circulating between the Volksgarten raiway station and the river Pruth.
The Central Square is the urban center of Chernivtsi, no less than seven streets meet here. Plans to give the square a modern and more attractive appearance and to solve the critical traffic situation are waiting to be implemented.
