Prater Museum

The Prater Museum is housed in the same building as the planetarium, which is between the Ferris wheel and the main boulevard in the Prater.It provides an insight into the history of Vienna’s greatest amusement park, the Wurstelprater, with exhibits such as an ancient fortune-telling machine and exhibits from ghost trains and curio displays.Hans Pemmer, a local historian, built the museum in his flat in 1933 and presented it to the City of Vienna in 1964, the year the planetarium opened.Exhibits from the Wien Museum, the Adanos collection, and Ernst Hrabalek’s magic lantern collection are also on display.

It was reported in the summer of 2021 that the Prater Museum will relocate from the planetarium to a refurbished ancient arcade in the Wurstelprater by 2024.The city contributed around 1.6 million euros to the conversion.There was a revision to the earlier designs for climate protection and sustainability reasons in the later plans – there should be a new two-story wooden structure on the location of the existing arcade, including a public event space on the ground level.The new permanent exhibition will be shown on the upper two floors.The investment expenses amounted to around EUR 4.1 million.On October 19, 2022, the new building’s groundbreaking ceremony took held.

The Prater Museum in the planetarium will continue open until May 2023, with the new Prater Museum set to open in March 2024.