Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
The Civil Servants' Estate
Minister. Permission for the sale of 95 plots was granted as a result, but conditions were even stricter than they had been the first time around. Soon enough, the 93 houses of the second stage were built on plots bordered by Szabóky (Bíró Lajos), Szapáry (Bláthy Ottó), Villám and Kendeffy (Győrffy István) streets with two plots reserved for the public institutions of the colony. The rest of the plots the Society had set its sights on were not obtainable as the municipality struck the issue of the outlying districts off its agenda. The first inhabitants of the Civil Servants' Housing Estate lived a busy social life including participation in the local chorus. The main venue of this activity was the club at 7-9 Szapáry (today's Bláthy Ottó) utca. The simple frame house of the club was built to plans by János Hofbauer in 1888. The brick building to house the Society was also raised on designs by Hofbauer, in the summer of 1891. Two primary schools were opened for the children of the colony (in 1893 and 1914), which was followed by the construction of the fine Hungarian Art Nouveau building of the secondary school (1911, Albert Körösy) on what is now Könyves Kálmán körűt. The building is no longer used as a school. Competitive designs for the Roman Catholic church were invited in 1914. Although the first prize was won by Ödön Lechner, World War I prevented the plans' being realised. The dome-topped church in Rezső tér was eventually built in 1931, in Neo-Classical style, to plans made by the great master's nephew, Jenő Lechner. The postal workers’ housing estate in Zugló As seen above, Budapest was rather unwilling to concede any of its land property, even though it owned as much as 11.5 million square fathoms back in 1908. (That amounted to 21 percent of the capital's entire land area, a percentage reduced by a mere 7 percent since 1874.) Another housing committee, set up in 1893, recommended in vain that the municipality set aside land suitable for the construction of detached houses to be sold at a fixed price to applicants every year. For fifteen years nothing of the sort was done, despite the fact that several applications were submitted by individuals, associations, and building societies. For example, the General Association for the Construction of Workers’ Houses, a society established in 1896, petitioned the city to sell it reasonably-priced plots of an appropriate size for a thousand houses to no avail. The Workers’ Home Building Society was founded the following year with the identical intention of building one thousand homes; the society was only able to obtain building plots outside the city boundaries in Rákosliget, where it raised some four hundred houses in a few years' time. Within the city, there was talk of nothing but rejected requests '5
