Until 1848, the village of Přívoz belonged to the town of Moravská Ostrava. In the following decades, it gradually freed itself from the influence of its larger neighbour, with which it shares a southern boundary. The growing importance of Přívoz was closely linked to the development of the railway. In 1847, a station on the Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway was opened in the southern part of the cadastral area, and Přívoz gradually became an important transport hub. It was at this station that, in January 1871, the Ostrava–Frýdlant Railway, running towards the foothills of the Moravian-Silesian Beskids, was connected to Cisleithania’s main railway line linking Vienna with Austrian Silesia and Galicia. The expansion of the railway network in the second half of the 19th century also stimulated unprecedented growth. While in 1843 the Přívoz cadastral area had 424 inhabitants, by 1900 the number had risen to 10,873.

In response to the increasing railway traffic, unprecedented demographic growth, and industrial production, the representatives of Přívoz decided in the early 1890s to commission a regulation plan for a new centre. They intended to create it on two plots near the railway station. Until then, the centre of the municipality had consisted only of street development along the road from Moravská Ostrava towards the Prussian border on the Odra River. The municipality sent two variants of a regulation plan for the new centre, prepared by local builders, to the already renowned Viennese architect and urban planner Camillo Sitte (1843–1903) for assessment. Sitte had become known among professionals, and to some extent also among the wider public, through his 1889 book City Planning According to Artistic Principles, in which he addressed the problems of planning towns and new urban districts in an accessible form. At the same time, he considered how new development could meet not only economic, sanitary, and transport requirements, but also achieve artistic value and preserve the aesthetic qualities of historic towns.

Sitte decided not only to prepare an assessment of the two proposals for the new centre of Přívoz, but also to offer the municipality his own services and design the regulation plan himself. The city leadership agreed. Between 1893 and 1895, Camillo Sitte prepared the plan on the basis of the ideas he had formulated in the above-mentioned treatise. He laid it out on two predetermined triangular plots divided diagonally by Nádražní Street, which linked Moravská Ostrava with the railway station in Přívoz. In the central part of the northern triangle he placed a rectangular square, today named after Svatopluk Čech, orienting its shorter side along Nádražní Street and its longer side towards the northern part of the site. While the southern side of the square was formed by apartment houses planned along Nádražní Street, Sitte placed a new parish church and rectory on the opposite, northern side.

In addition to Nádražní Street, he allowed Chopinova Street to enter the square from the south, Libušina Street from the east, and Wattova Street from the north-west near the rectory. A distinctive urban motif in Sitte’s work was the routing of streets, especially their bending or turning. In this way he sought to shape the course of streets so that the spatial energy of a place would be accumulated and prevented from escaping out of the square through open streets into empty space. The aim was to create urban units that were permeable for traffic, yet visually and spatially enclosed, with a character corresponding to the squares and streets of historic towns. In specialist literature, street corridors designed in this way are also referred to as turbine streets. These turbine streets were employed not only in the regulation plan for Přívoz, but also in those for Mariánské Hory and Hrušov, on which Sitte collaborated with his son Siegfried.

The new centre of Přívoz began to be built according to Sitte’s regulation plan in the mid-1890s. Between 1895 and 1897, the town hall was built to his design (now the seat of the Ostrava City Archive, Špálova Street 450/19), followed between 1895 and 1899 by the new late historicist Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. In its vicinity, Sitte planned a historicist rectory. The apartment houses in the area developed according to Sitte’s regulation plan were built to designs by architects and builders active in the Ostrava region. At the beginning of the development these were brick two-storey houses; by the late 1890s, three-storey houses were being built, and by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the largest buildings in the new centre of Přívoz had reached four storeys.

The prevailing architectural language was late historicism, with Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque elements, and Art Nouveau in forms ranging from early vegetal motifs to later classicising variants. The most prominent figure here was the architect and builder Felix Neumann from Moravská Ostrava, who designed not only several apartment houses along Nádražní Street and on the square, but also the Přívoz synagogue, built on Hlávkova Street. Development of this part of Přívoz was completed before the outbreak of the First World War. In the interwar period, changes mainly affected the surroundings of the new Přívoz centre.

The Second World War marked the beginning of the decline of this part of Ostrava. The local synagogue was destroyed by the Nazis in 1939, and the Holocaust meant the loss of part of the local population. Another tragic transformation followed with the expulsion of the German population and, after the Communist coup, the confiscation of property belonging to the remaining inhabitants. Like other parts of Ostrava, Přívoz was slated for clearance. The entire district gradually deteriorated, and in the 1970s plans were made for a radical redevelopment of its centre. Clearance was partially carried out during that decade, when most of the apartment houses along Mariánskohorská Street were demolished.

During the 1970s and especially the 1980s, in connection with the postmodern turn in world architecture and urbanism, ideas emphasising the value of historicist and Art Nouveau architecture, as well as the work of Camillo Sitte himself, began to gain ground in the Czech environment. The most important buildings in this part of the city – the church, town hall, rectory, and the most significant apartment houses – were gradually proposed for listing as cultural monuments during the 1980s. Only in 2003, however, was the centre of Přívoz within the boundaries of Camillo Sitte’s regulation plan declared an urban conservation area. This was followed in 2004 by the renovation of Svatopluka Čecha Square, including its paving and street furniture.

At the same time, the façades of a number of apartment houses underwent heritage rehabilitation, and some buildings were restored in full. This process, however, is still far from complete. The urban and architectural design of this part of Přívoz is a valuable example of town planning according to the ideas of Camillo Sitte, one of the leading European urban planners of the turn of the 20^th century. It is also an important example of the local building and architectural culture of the period, shaped by late historicism and Art Nouveau. Today, the area also demonstrates the important role of heritage protection in preserving architectural, urban, and historical heritage of international significance.

MSt