Saly Noémi: Café?! Változatok és változások Időszaki kiállítás 2007. február–május (Budapest, 2007)

continuously to reach by 1944 once again the 150 cafés of 1872. It must be pointed out here too, that the cafés were not wiped off the map of the city by the otherwise extreme devastation caused by the siege of Budapest 1944-1945, but by the nationalization dial took place in 1948-1949. During the years of the coalition, not all of them but at least 120 re-opened and functioned while they could, much to the delight of their surviving clientele. The Bolshevik leadership left a few samples or rather it allowed only a few of them to reopen after a few years, redesigned and devoid of their original atmosphere. These are the bare facts, to be more precise, a few figures indicating the main trend of their development. They say a lot in themselves, but should be interpreted historically. We must keep at least two circumstances in mind. We were not acting arbitrarily when, in the years preceding the amalgamation in 1873, we added together the number of cafés in Buda, Óbuda, Margaret Island and Pest, for the concept of Budapest had originated in the reform era. With the opening of the Chain Bridge in 1849, the process of integrating the towns into a capital city had in fact taken place long before the administrative unification. We must remind the reader at the beginning of the third millennium however, that it was only in 1949, with the addition of twenty-two towns and communities formerely managed by autonomous councils, that Budapest expanded to its present size and became Greater Budapest. Thus our astonishing figures of the bourgeois era refer to a city of a much smaller area and population than the present one and, of the districts now considered out of the way, only included Kőbánya. It is important to be aware of this, because the outlying districts of the bourgeois era - to mention only Újpest, Rákospalota, Kispest, Pestszentlőrinc or Budafok - were under separate administration, but at the same time were not strictly separate geographically. For at the turn of the twentieth century the capital had already embraced these places by means of public transport, primarily by the tram. In terms of economy and town structure and in the sense of a homogeneous experience ol space, which also applies to the use of cafés, Greater Budapest came into being much earlier than it did administratively. We have not done so, but according to what we have outlined above, it would not be in the least unhistorical to add the figures for cafés in the outlying districts to the statistics lor the period between 1873 and 1949. A further important fact is that during the long period of its existence, though the café was the main establishment where coffee was consumed in public, it was by no means the only one. Of the many 'fellow' establishments competing with it, we must mention coffee bars, already referred to above, but also patisseries, restaurants and finally espresso bars. Throughout the period, there was fierce competition between the cafés and coffee bars, a category now extinct. The reason for this is precisely that they were too close in character and function. Although there were habitually twice as many coffee bars as cafés in Budapest, we know a lot less about them. Documents from their trade associations were destroyed, their trade press was not as rich as that of the cafés, fewer photographs were taken or survived and there is simply no comparison between the extent ol their presence in literature and newspaper articles of the same period with the writing on cafés. The fierceness of the competition is clearly demonstrated by the rulings regulating the functioning of coffee bars. We could