Dom Bohumila Hrabala w Pradze, Former residential building in Libeň district, Prague, Czech Republic
The demolished building at Na Hrázi 24 in Prague's Libeň district was an old, dilapidated tenement. Its courtyard, behind a shared toilet, held the entrance to a former blacksmith's workshop converted into a flat where Bohumil Hrabal lived. The flat had a kitchen facing the door and a side room.
Bohumil Hrabal lived in a flat in the old tenement at Na Hrázi 24 in Libeň from the 1950s until 1973, when he and his wife Eliška Plevová moved to a Prague housing block. The building, together with a whole row of the street, was demolished in 1988 for the metro line B tunnel and its Palmovka station. Ladislav Michálek photographed the demolition for Vladimír Boudník's Explosionism movement.
The building served as a gathering place for artists and intellectuals, with Hrabal often hosting informal wedding ceremonies and literary discussions in his apartment.
The site lies by the Palmovka metro station on line B, whose tunnel and station replaced the building and its whole street front in 1988. A long concrete retaining wall now stands there, carrying a 5.5-metre mural of Hrabal with his Perkeo typewriter and sixteen cats, painted by Táňa Svatošová. A memorial plaque hangs at the entrance to the metro's technical rooms.
The street name Na Hrázi Věčnosti, meaning 'On the Embankment of Eternity,' was personally promoted by Hrabal during his residence there.
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