Schönborn Palace

The Schönborn Palace in the Malá Strana district of Prague is the current home of the United States Embassy to the Czech Republic. The first United States Minister to Czechoslovakia was Richard Crane, the grandson of a Chicago plumbing millionaire. Crane, who had acquired the palace at the end of the First World War, sold the building in 1925 to the United States Government for $117,000.HistoryRudolf von Colloredo built the present palace between 1643 and 1656 on the site of an earlier building that had been destroyed during the Thirty Years War. Having lost a leg at the Battle of Lutzen, the count had the flight of steps leading to the first garden terrace built with a special incline to enable him to ride into his palace on horseback.The palace was ultimately inherited by the Schönborn family, from whom it took its present name. Writer Franz Kafka lived and worked in the building in 1917. The last inhabitant was count Carl Johann Schönborn (1890-1952), grand nephew of Prague cardinal Franziskus Schönborn and grandfather of Vienna cardinal Christoph Schönborn, who sold the property in 1919, after World War I, to Richard Teller Crane II, who served as US ambassador from 1919 until 1921 and sold it to the United States Government in 1924.