Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
Pest-Buda from 1686 to 1849
to the more elegant taste of the noblemen and officials settling in the city and the increasing demands of the wealthy bourgeoisie, finer and more architecturally interesting buildings began to adorn the two cities. And the large influx of people led to the replacement of the earlier one-storey buildings serving mostly as the home of a single family, or the occasional two-storey couple of flats, by higher blocks of flats. The high houses of the Lipótváros district, all designed to a single architectural plan at the end of the eighteenth century, and the straight well-composed pattern of its streets to a certain extent served as a model for the development of a uniform concept of town-planning. In the first half of the nineteenth century this district was accounted one of the smartest in Pest; the buildings were occupied by wealthy manufacturers, wholesale merchants and prosperous lawyers; the fringes on the north gradually developed into a factory district called Angyalföld (Field of Angels), which later played an important part in the history of the Hungarian labour movement. The old Inner City of Pest, with its narrow streets and its immediate suburbs, still little moie than villages, needed to be brought up-to-date and improved. A special committee —the Committee for the Embellishment of Pest—presided over by the Palatine, was set up in 1808 to produce and carry into execution a town-planning scheme. Only a section of the large-scale plan of renovation was actually carried out, but the period during which the Committee functioned saw the construction of many public buildings of great architectural merit and fine noblemen’s palaces, blocks of flats, and private houses, which went to make up the uniform neo-Classical townscape of Pest. Paradoxically, Pest owed its new metropolitan appearance to the terrible destruction wrought by the 1838 floods, which reduced almost two-thirds of the buildings of Pest to ruins and made some 50,000 people in the two cities homeless. The old houses in the suburbs, built of poor materials, were the main victims of the Danube waves. The building regulations issued after the flood—the first of their kind—insisted on the use of good quality building material, walls of a certain defined thickness, and also contained regulations on the facades of buildings as well. Basic rules of sanitation were also laid down. Within something like four years the worst ravages of the floods were repaired. The speed and extent of the reconstruction following the flood were perhaps achieved at the cost of architectural beauty in a number of cases, but it was then that the old semi-village suburbs took on an urban appearance, and the metropolitan character of contemporary Pest began to emerge. The most beautiful architectural monuments of this period are the National Museum and the County Hall; but many fine, neo-Classical individual buildings have come down from this period in the Lipótváros district as well. In Buda, due to lack of capital and the much slower rate of increase in the population, building proceeded at a much slower pace than in Pest, and as a result it retained a good deal of its earlier Baroque. But the holiday districts which began to spring up in the neighbouring mountains, with houses often imitating the mansions of the nobility, gave a new note to the surroundings. From the beginning of the nineteenth century Pest, daily increasing in beauty and wealth, had become a great city, and was accepted without question as the economic centre of Hungary. But it gradually took over the leadership of the intellectual and political life of the country as well. True, it was rather the place, the stage, of the struggles for the transformation of the country to a bourgeois society and the achievement of Hungarian independence, than providing its actual social basis, for the stagnation due to the continuance of semi-32
