Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)
Steps to our bellies - from the Central Market Hall to Lehel tér
been, a market hall, without turning itself into yet another shopping centre. Customers found their way around the parking facilities as well as the multitudes of lifts and escalators. Here, too, are such requisites of traditional market life as the supplementary stalls selling lángos (fried dough) and the standing-only bars next to them. The rationale of the designer's approach is soon revealed as one enters the hall from the underground station or from the bustle of the busy Váci út. Occupying the smallish central area are small table stalls, reminiscent of the old marketplace, where producers sell directly to the public. If we arrive from the somewhat alienating world of the rooftop car park, then we can either descend in the lift or walk down the stairs to gradually adjust our vision to the sight of heaps of colourful fruit and vegetables. Painted blue and yellow, the steel components of the hall's structure remind the visitor of Budapest's century-old market halls. At the "Old Lehel,’’ there were no stairs whatever, as the popular marketplace was a flat labyrinth of alleys zigzagging among a jumble of single-storey shacks and sheet-covered huts pouring rainwater down the shoppers' necks. Looking at the new hall one has a hard time trying to remember what there was to like about it all: the difference between the old and new is a quantum leap. That gap is perhaps what the by-now popular stairs here are meant to bridge. Budapest's spiral stairs with the largest diameter in the "Rolling Mill of Buda” The object of heated arguments while being built, the Hotel Budapest or, as it came to be colloquially referred to, the Hotel in the Round (or, more facetiously, the Rolling Mill of Buda) was eventually accepted by the city. Aside from the renovation of its external facing, the free-standing building designed in 1964-65 by György Szrogh, who won the Ybl Prize with this work, has not changed very much in the past half century. József Király’s interior design may soon earn this thousand-eyed tower of Buda the status of protected monument. As already suggested in a way by the shape and spirit of the external appearance, there must be a vaulting set of astonishing stairs inside. Entering the building that stands in Szilágyi Erzsébet fasor raised on a plot that had served as a market farm before, the visitor is greeted by the sight of a vaulting, dynamic structure combining the looks of a ramp and a stairway in its appearance. The hotel staff simply refer to it as the "Lame Man's Stairs”. Its curious and apt nickname derives from the steps' very moderate rise height of 15 centimetres and the disproportionately large tread 52
