Naschmarkt

What began as a milk market perched atop a city ash dump took its first name Aschenmarkt.  From the ash-wood pails used to carry the milk, though the waste beneath the cobblestones also put in a reasonable claim. A 1793 ordinance ruled that any produce arriving by cart must be sold on this very patch of ground, while goods that floated in by boat retained the freedom of the docks. By the early nineteenth century, exotic confections  such as sugared orange zests, imported dates, small edible wonders had begun appearing among the cabbages, and the name Naschmarkt crept in as a gentle joke, naschen being the art of eating sweets on the sly. Engineers encased the chronically flooding Wien River in concrete between 1895 and 1899, the market expanded over this grey sarcophagus, and in 1905 the name became official. Plans for a grand imperial boulevard to Schönbrunn nearly swept it away entirely. Then the First World War intervened, and the boulevard, like so many grand plans, was quietly forgotten.