Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: Narodni Trida

The reconstruction of the Narodni Trida Metro station has dragged on for over two years now, and this was how far it had gotten as of July, 2013. You can vaguely see the tunnel on right, but from the train you don't notice the construction. At the time I took this, the station still looked the same from the train, and indeed trains have continued to operate, albeit without stopping. Since that time, the station interior has been stripped out, and will probably be replaced. The station had accumulated a lot of water damage over the years, and not just from the 2002 flood, so I suppose they wanted to do something about it. Since I took this photo, this project has accelerated dramatically, and now a large building is being constructed over this site, the purpose of which I haven't read about yet. Presumably, the station is close to complete by now.

This wasn't my first-ever shot of one of the new Skoda 15t trams, but it was my first shot of one in revenue service. This was at the Narodni Divadlo stop, and the only reason that I got the shot was that I was in the coffeehouse in the Nova Scena (formerly Laterna Magika) theatre connected to the Narodni Divadlo, or National Theatre.

I took this on Spalena, as #9095, one of the rebuilt Tatra KT8D5RN2P trams, was approaching the Narodni Trida stop. I think the motorbike in Purkynova is an especially nice touch.

Next to the Moebius Mural is the famous November 17th, or Velvet Revolution memorial, commemorating the sufferings and deaths of the dissidents who brought the Communist system down. It's located in an arcade through the front of a building on Narodni Trida, where it was said a student was murdered by police on November 17th, 1989. To this day, this has never been confirmed, and amazingly the most common explanation was that the StB (secret police) circulated the rumour in order to escalate the violence and hence justify disproportionate retaliation. If this is true, they failed spectacularly, as the enormous demonstrations and general strike which followed brought down the regime, with the police, largely sympathetic to the revolution, refused to fire a shot. Czechs call the incident in Narodni Trida a "massacre," even though there was only the one rumoured fatality, and the rest of the violence involved the police feebly clubbing protestors, who took a long time to disperse. Historian Howard Zinn calls the phenomenon of willful police inaction/ineffectiveness during the Velvet Revolution (and the other 1989 European anti-Communist revolutions) "The Revolt of the Guards," and many credit this principle with allowing the revolution to go ahead, as only five months earlier, Chinese soldiers and police put an end to pro-Democracy protests with a "real" massacre of 400-10,000 people, the very uncertainty of the numbers saying as much about the regime as anything, with such figures being a closely-guarded secret.

I've been surprised again and again at how well the W302 can do panning. It doesn't even have manual controls, but somehow it usually works. I would have preferred for the tram to be less blurred in this shot, and for the car to be more so, but that's life. I think it came out quite nicely.

Here's my second good shot of a T3R.PLF, in this case 8263 rolling into the Narodni Trida stop. The tram on the right is T3SU #7152.

This is maybe my first good color shot of this tram, #5002, which is the best-preserved Tatra T1 in Prague. It was also the second T1 produced, after DPP #5001. It's also the one that runs well enough to be used for charters, special occasions, and sometimes historical tram service #91, although that's a rare occurance. Normally, it only works service #91 on November 17th, the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. The Tatra T1 is a Communist-era design, being the first tram design used in Prague with two modern four-wheel bogies, as opposed to having four wheels suspended directly from the frame. Introduced in 1952 and produced until 1958, these trams were based on the famous American PCC cars of the 1930's, although the subsequent T2 class (produced 1955-1958) looks visually more like a PCC.

Here's more of a closeup shot of #5002. The commotion over to the left is in an arcade of sorts which contains the memorial to November 17th and the Velvet Revolution. The Velvet Revolution was a gradual process, of course, and it didn't begin or end on November 17th, 1989, but in Prague November 17th was when students held a demonstration on roughly this spot, which the police broke up with violence. At the time a death was reported, which rumour subsequently escalated, in the public perception, into a "massacre," which resulted in weeks of demonstrations, which may have involved as many as 500,000 people. The irony is that the rumor of the dead student was disseminated by the StB, the Communist secret police. A five-hour general strike on November 27th may have involved more, however, as the population of Czechoslovakia at that time was in excess of 15 million. On the 28th, the Communist government, rather than carrying out a real massacre on the model of Tianamen Square, instead decided to announce their resignation, which took effect on December 10th. The interim government shared power between Communists and non-Communists until an election could be called in June of 1990. An interesting side note was that this interim government included Alexander Dubcek, the former Communist president who provoked the 1968 Soviet invasion with his liberal policies. The 1990 election resulted in Vaclav Havel, a playwright and founding member of Carta 77 (the most prominent organization to oppose the Communist regime), being elected the new president.

Palac Adria aroused some controversy immediately post-1989 during privatisation of Prague's real-estate, when there was talk of selling it to a detergent company (or so the plan went, anyway, I know little about what ultimately happened). Vaclav Havel, who was president at the time, caught most of the flak, as he supported the sale, on the basis that a successful business could invest more money in its restoration than the government could. Critics thought it inappropriate to privatise a property of Palac Adria's architecural and historic significance, if god forbid it could be torn down or arsoned. For more on this, see the documentary film about Vaclav Havel "Obcan Havel," a.k.a. "Citizen Havel." In the end, it survived, and is today a successful office building, theatre, and coffeehouse, as seen here. Built in 1922-1925, and designed by Jakub Potucek, Palac Adria is considered a prime example of rondo-cubist architecture. It was originally supposed to be for an Italian insurance company, so there are a lot of interesting mosaics inside depicting the different types of insurance on offer.

In the past year or two, I've done a lot with trams passing doorways and portals of different types, since many other people on Flickr have had very good luck with this type of composition. I took this shot in front of the Kostel sv. Vorsili, or St. Ursula's Church, on Narodni Trida.