Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
From City to Metropolis (1849-1919)
financial circumstances. The number of inhabitants increased from 270,000 in 1869 to 930,000 in 1913, making Budapest the eighth most populous metropolis in Europe. If the newcomers in the suburbs are included, its population already exceeded a million. In the course of two generations approximately one and a half million people adopted urban life in the city with all its accompanying effects and influences, including a new social consciousness and political attitude. The mass of peasants and village craftsmen moving to Budapest from the land became absorbed in the industrial organization of a big city as wage-earners, consumers and buyers of food from small independent agricultural producers, and, finally, tenants. At the same time, many of the non-Hungarian newcomers became Magyarized within the course of one to two generations. Such far-reaching changes, and the alienation often experienced by people uprooted from their traditional environment, provided the danger of new social conflicts. The planning and growth of Budapest, which continued to be co-ordinated and partly directed by the Board of Public Works closely followed the economic development of the city, and the growth of the population—even though not sufficiently in all respects. The number of houses was doubled between 1870 and 1910—from 9,351 to 18,035, with a fourfold increase in the total number of stories from 9,351 to 35,876. Out of the total buildings of four storeys or more increased from 2.1 per cent to 18.07 per cent. The main thoroughfares and squares planned at the beginning of the seventies were built in Eclectic and Flamboyant styles; including Art Nouveau architecture, which became fashionable around the turn of the century. Entire districts disappeared without trace, even the lines of the streets vanished in the new town-planning projects. In the old Inner City, for instance, the city council moved from the condemned old town-hall to the Army Pensioners’ Hospital, purchased for the purpose. Big blocks of flats and the public buildings typical of a modern state went up one after another. On the outskirts, in the process of transformation from rural to urban life, in the side streets deliberately planned to be narrow in order to make the maximum use of the land served by public utilities, went up the tenement blocks, the dwellings of the poor. Even in the historical district of Buda Castle, more or less untouched, new, monumental elements were introduced by the neo-Baroque alterations to the Royal Palace, the neo-Gothic restoration of the Matthias Church, with the pseudo- Romanesque Fishermen’s Bastion constructed around it, and a number of new Government buildings. As a result of the exhibition arranged for the millenary celebrations—the millenary of the Magyar conquest of 896 A.D.—and the development of the Zoo, as well as the building of the great art galleries, the “City Park” district was also embellished and improved. Three new bridges across the Danube were also built between 1876 and 1912 to facilitate city traffic. The Elizabeth Bridge (1903) was for a long time the largest single-span suspension bridge in Europe. By 1912, the city’s tramway system, which had been gradually electrified from 1889, amounted to 153 kilometres in all, carrying 157 million passengers annually. In 1896 a small underground railway line was also built, the first on the Continent. Horse-drawn omnibuses carried only 13 million passengers in 1912—and during the First World War the first omnibuses appeared on the streets. Public utilities, taken over by the municipality at the beginning of the century, were also being developed rapidly: in 1910, the city was served by 601 kilometres of gas mains, and the annual gas consumption was 63 million cubic metres. The electricity cables amounted to 505 kilometers in length in 41
