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Herrengasse was the preferred address of the nobility from the time the Habsburgs moved into the Hofburg until the fall of the dynasty in 1918. Its name dates from the sixteenth century, when the Diet of Lower Austria built its Landhaus , which still stands at no. 13. Vienna was for centuries the capital of Lower Austria - the region surrounding the city - but in 1986 the small provincial town of St Polten took over the mantle, making the Vienna Landhaus redundant. Opposite the Landhaus is the grandiose Italianate Palais Ferstel , built in the Ringstrasse style by Heinrich Ferstel in 1860 and home to Vienna's most famous Kaffeehaus , Cafe Central , restored in 1986 primarily as a tourist attraction (though a very beautiful one at that). At the turn of the twentieth century, the cafe was the meeting place of the city's intellectuals, including the first generation of Austrian Socialists - Karl Renner, Viktor Adler and Otto Bauer - occasional chess adversaries of Leon Trotsky, who also whiled away several years here before World War I. At the entrance to the cafe is a life-size papier-mache model of the moustachioed poet Peter Altenberg, another of the cafe's fin-de-siecle regulars. Further up Herrengasse, past the cafe, is the entrance to the Freyung Passage - built in the 1860s as part of the Palais Ferstel - an eminently civilized, lovingly restored shopping arcade, which links Herrengasse with Freyung. The focus of this elegant marble passage is a glass-roofed, hexagonal atrium, with a fountain, crowned by a statue of the Donaunixen (Danube Mermaid), whose trickling water echoes down the arcade.
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