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

during the decades leading up to World War 1, as we have seen, Budapest had several hundred 'grand cafés'. But it is enough to reflect a little. Within the average city society, we always find more lawyers, doctors and engineers - not to mention officers, hairdressers or printers - than we do writers and poets, many of them later taking up similarly respectable bourgeois occupations. This is as much as we can say here about the calé. For lack ol space, we cannot set ourselves further objectives than the rebuttal of the three principal tenets of café mythology. Perhaps they serve as an appropriate background lor these lines analysing the era of socialist espresso bars and the developments of the boom in establishing new cafés in Budapest, which constitute the main subject ol this exhibition. We have already mentioned that the cafés of Budapest, despite all their trials and tribulations, were not destroyed by the siege; a good proportion of them regained their looting, and even in the desperate economic and political atmosphere, took a stand in the city once again. The police harassment that became chronic throughout the coalition years, anticipated and prepared for the nationalisation of 1948-49. Police raids against both black coffee drinkers and black marketeers - a pun way beyond the common imagination ol the authorities! - and the ordinances aggravating life in the cafés and limiting their freedom, were everyday occurrences. Naturally, these affected all the other public institutions in the city - including the cafés. If then we repeal at this poini that in the capital - and across the entire country! - it was the espresso bar that became the surviving institution ol public coffee consumption, we are not asserting for a moment that this was some kind of organic change in the process of modernisation. In so far as il is certain that in the case of organic development - that is if alter 1945 the country had succumbed lo the fate of Austria and thus Budapest to the fate of Vienna - the espresso bars would have meant an even more serious challenge to the cafes than they did before the war, it can be taken as just as certain that the latter would not have disappeared in the least, but would have risen to the challenge in various ways, and some sort of co-existence of the two types of institutions would have evolved, just as it did in every other large city in Europe, where espresso bars appeared alongside ihe café. It is even more important to emphasise this because the standardised and centralised socialist network ol espresso bars .started from scratch. (Five large catering companies were established on a regional basis - in the inner city, Northern Pest, Southern Pest, Northern Buda and Southern Buda - and their directors decided how man)' espresso bars there would be in the individual districts, where, how they would be fitted out, under whose management, and so on...) In typical cases, it was not that the espressos that had been established before the war, or even during ihe coalition years, were seized from their owners and absorbed by the new network, but similarly to the cafés, they were liquidated and new places were opened. Although there were the odd survivors as the exception to the rule, these were as few and far between as the cafés. It was thanks to the intervention of Mayor Zoltán Vas, who newer denied his own predilection for calés, that the New York was able to reopen under the name Hungária in 1954. Among the other survivors were the previously mentioned Astoria, the Múzeum, the Belvárosi, the Abbázia refashioned as an espresso, the EMKE and the Simplon, as well as the Baross and the Deák, which were similarly transformed and remained open until the late sixties.