Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)
Spiral stairs cast in iron
and function alike, was built to designs by Rezső Ray Jr. in 1916. When completed, the exchange was capable of handling 480 intercity circuits. Its ground-floor area housed a post office. From here a wide, single flight stairway led to the switchboard rooms expanding from the ground floor to the upstairs area. On the side of the building overlooking Német utca were the trunk-call switchboards and, between these, the dispatch-tube centre. The dining hall and the toilets were located in the courtyard tract. Arranged on the upper storeys (floors 2, 3, and 4) were the offices. The imposing staircase that makes such a curious impression of spatial arrangement owed its spaciousness to the requirement of speedy evacuation in case of fire. The multitude of cables insulated, according to the technological standards of the period, in rubber and paper sheathing was particularly inflammable, which is why they were laid in iron cable pipes filled with sand in order that they might easily be segmented in the event of a fire. There were four manually operated exchange boards in each switching room with thirty operators’ positions by each. The young female employees were protected from the noise of the relays by glass sheets. The broad passageways around the central staircase were also meant to facilitate speedy evacuation, but luckily there were no major fires breaking out in the building. With the technological evolution of telephone exchanges, ever smaller units could be built. In recent years one exchange centre has been closed down after the other, and its fate has caught up with the József Exchange, too. Its future is yet to be determined, with property developers still weighing the available options. It is to be hoped that its rooms and their unique atmosphere will still be there for us to admire when the building has assumed its new function. Spiral stairs cast in iron When it was still in its original site in 1996 in the Ganz Electric Factory, the cast iron spiral staircase would never have dreamt that it was to become a museum exhibit. The factory, until its demolition, stood in the place of today’s Mammut II Shopping Mall. The stairway was rescued and transferred to the Foundry Museum, which is near the location of its discovery. The foundry industry of Hungary acted in unison to replace the damaged or missing parts before the stairway was reassembled in a corner of the historical hall of the Ganz foundry. Dedicated museologists identified the maker when they discovered a likeness of the stairs among the drawings in the sample collection of the Anina Iron Foundry. The rejuvenated iron matron was given a new function: the metal stairway now leads up to the gallery used for small 66
