Andy Warhol stopped by for a cup of his coffee. So did princes, paupers, playwrights, poets and untold thousands.
To visit Vienna without a cup of steaming brew served by the bow-tied little man with the perpetual dancing smile was unthinkable. In a city of 1,900 cafés, Leopold Hawelka was an icon, as much part of Café Hawelka as its tables – scarred by burned-out cigarettes, their marble tops worn smooth by the elbows of four generations.
He served tourists, the rich and the famous, and the neediest of the needy – the ragged Viennese masses who crowded his establishment over a free glass of water to escape the cold of their bombed-out city after the World War II.
His daughter, Herta, said he died on Thursday at the age of 100 – leaving behind a legacy as intimately linked with the Austrian capital as any of its splendid palaces or sumptuous art collections.
Café Hawelka was never posh. But while costly makeovers left other cafés soulless, Hawelka’s grew in charm with each layer of patina laid down over more than 70 years of ungentrified existence that left it little changed from the bleak post-war days.
Today – as generations ago – tuxedoed waiters flit around tables, precariously balancing countless Viennese coffee varieties and trademark yeast dumplings on silver trays.
Wooden wall panelling is lovingly scarred by the countless initials of past visitors and paintings exchanged for a cup of coffee by impoverished artists in the 1940s still hang on the walls.
Even the ashtrays survived Vienna’s no-smoking laws – though staff put them out in recent years only when ordered to do so by Mr Hawelka, keeping a sharp eye on things from a stuffed brocade couch in the back of his establishment.
It was this sense of tradition that made Café Hawelka special – along with reminiscences from the unassuming owner and his late wife, Josefine.
Some of their best stories stretched back to the immediate post-war years, when – split into Soviet, United States, British and French zones – Vienna was the place of intrigue reflected by the film classic The Third Man.
The son of a shoemaker, Mr Hawelka opened the coffee house in 1938, only to close it a year later when he was drafted into Hitler’s army. A survivor of the deadly Soviet front, he reopened in 1945 – to a cold and hungry clientele that reflected the grimness of those years.
“As soon as they saw smoke curling out of the stovepipe they came,” Mr Hawelka told The Associated Press in a 2001 interview.
“It was a sign that we, at least, had it warm. Some of them sat there the whole day over a glass of water so that they could stay warm.”
Over the hiss of espresso machines and the multilingual chatter rising from the tables, Mr Hawelka recalled getting up before dawn, walking for two hours to the Vienna Woods and trudging back with a sack of firewood to keep the stove burning.
A Soviet officer was a regular back then. Eyed by hungry, silent Viennese he would bring his lunch, gobbling down thick slices of ham speared on a penknife.
The Hawelkas themselves dealt in contraband cigarettes in those lean and hungry days, while recalling others selling black-market lard by the ton.
Titles and possessions gone, the Prince of Liechtenstein and other Austrian royalty held court in Café Hawelka and sold whatever they had been able to hide – carpets, paintings and anything else the Nazis and Soviets did not get to first.
Until his wife’s death at 91 in 2005, the couple worked up to 14 hours a day. He would open early. She closed at 2 a.m. and pored over the books until dawn.
The crowd changed – from the post-war displaced to the likes of Warhol, playwright Arthur Miller and local literary and artistic giants, to business travellers, students and tourists.
But the sense of time at a near standstill stayed the same, with some guests lingering for hours over their cup of coffee and glass of water.
Although family members – the couple had two children – took over the business in recent years, Mr Hawelka himself was a regular until his late 90s.
Too weak to attend his 100th birthday party on April 11 2011, his smiling portrait placed on his couch served as a reminder of his vigilant commitment to his guests and their welfare.
Back then, long-time patrons reminisced of the special place Café Hawelka held in their hearts.
“It was my living room when I was in Vienna,” said Robert de Clercq, a 75-year-old Dutchman who first met Mr Hawelka 42 years ago.
Annemarie Eppinger recalled how, years ago, Mr Hawelka had watched over her university student niece as she hit the books at a café table, shooing away those who might distract her.“He was like a father to her”, she said.
Andy Warhol was one of Mr Hawelka’s clients.