At the top of the hillside is the quarter of Weißer Hirsch, named after a former inn erected in 1685 by the Saxon kapellmeister Christoph Bernhard, where in 1888 the naturopathic physician Heinrich Lahmann opened a sanatorium.

About 1660 Elector John George II of Saxony had several vineyards laid out at the hillside, that soon became a fashionable recreational and residential area for the Dresden nobility and wealthy bourgeois like the composer Heinrich Schütz or the goldsmith Johann Melchior Dinglinger.

The author Christian Gottfried Körner had a cottage within the vineyards, where his guest Friedrich Schiller wrote the Ode to Joy in 1785.

A famous inhabitant of Weißer Hirsch was the inventor Manfred von Ardenne with his institute for scientific research.

This is evidenced in the surviving funicular railway, originally placed as an aid purely to residents in ascending the steep slopes of the river valley, and only recently having acquired novelty as a minor tourist attraction.