34 Hotel Imperátor

The badly damaged but still majestic building in U Červeného kostela Street is one of the last reminders of the glory of Trnovany. This building, put up by the Palme company in 1912, was once the home of Hotel Imperátor.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Trnovany went through a rapid transformation from a village into an industrial town that boldly competed with Teplice. Ponds in the area were drained to make room for new buildings, ceramics works sprang up, two new churches were completed in 1905 and 1909, and a row of showy houses rose along what was then Lípová Street. Among them was Hotel Imperátor, the pride of a self-confident town. Besides hotel services, the building with its modernist features offered a restaurant and a café, a concert and dance hall, a photographic studio and even a cinema.

The further ambitions of this growing Art Nouveau town came to an end with the expulsion of its German population. During the Second World War, Trnovany was joined to Teplice, and in the years of so-called normalization it went through a brutal large-scale demolition, which cleared the ground for today’s housing estate of prefabricated blocks. Once the blocks of flats were built right next to it, the hotel lost its role as the dominant feature of the area.

In fact, the Imperátor survived the demolition only by a hair’s breadth. In the last years of its use, it housed the Karel Aksamit Primary School, and a small metal sign by the entrance still reminds you of that today.