Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

The stairts of the old Tabán quarter

■ The Tabán in the ig200

tram tracks, and the widening of Attila and Árok streets the noose was tightened around the neck of the Tabán. The implementation of development plans prepared for the neighbourhood in 1913 was postponed by World War I, but the law regulating the operation of medicinal baths in 1929 sealed the fate of the Tabán for good: a town of baths was now envisaged to be created in its place. The last word on the matter was spoken on 23 May 1933. Then, the 3,700 residents of the Tabán were moved out of their homes with surprising dispatch and the demolition of houses, schools, businesses and cellars was immediately undertaken. In 1935-37 the area was converted into a public garden. Although designs for a new hotel-cum-baths complex were completed, its construction was prevented by World War II. The siege of Budapest devastated some of the buildings that had survived the clearance, and even the undamaged building of the Serbian Orthodox St Demetrius Church was pulled down as a birthday present for Stalin in 1949. The last "facelift’’ was implemented as a prelude to the opening of the rebuilt Elizabeth Bridge in 1964. The waterfall beneath St Gellért’s monument was rendered functional again, the parks were spruced up, the roads repaved, and the tram tracks refurbished. Public parks and tennis courts were built on the gently inclining hillside of the Tabán. A few memorial plaques, the Tabán Memorial Exhibition and Archives in the busy Döbrentei utca, and the descendants of the former stairways are the only reminders of what the old Tabán might have been for Casanova, Gyula Krúdy, and Antal Szerb.

21