Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)
nasties, athletics, bicycle races) and originally meant to be pulled down after the memorial festivities. Only a few years later, the Hungarian Athletics Club (known by its abbreviation as MAC) stood on Margaret Island and the grounds of the Ferencváros Gymnastics Club (FTC) were also in place in Soroksári út. The Third District Gymnastics and Fencing Association, the Újpest Gymnastics Association and the Budapest Gymnastics Club built their facilities in Szépvölgyi út, on Nép-sziget (The People’s Island) and on the Rákos Meadow respectively. Athletes and cyclists trained in the Orczy Gardens, taken over by the army treasury (it was here, for example, that the Olympic eliminating competitions were held in March 1896). In the first decades of the 20th century the better-off clubs built their uniform stadia, featuring grandstands, one after the other in the outlying districts of the capital. It was at that time that the horse-racing courses were installed in the vicinity of the Eastern Railway Station. The swimming areas gradually disappeared from the Danube, their patrons having been lured away by the indoor swimming pool on Margaret Island and the lidos and baths built over the thermal springs of Buda and Pest. During World War II, the first covered sports hall was eventually built in the place of the former racing course in Thököly út. Several sports buildings were reduced to rubble or seriously damaged during the siege of Budapest, but the destruction also provided an excuse for general reconstruction and modernisation. The government spent large amounts of money-if for no other reason then because the regime realised the publicity potential of sport. By 1953 the People’s Stadium had been raised, and a veritable sports city grew up around it in the three decades to follow. The last item of this complex, the Budapest Sports Hall, was opened in 1982 and burnt down at the end of 1999; the facility is expected to be rebuilt in a more modern shape in a few years. No other sports-related construction of comparable proportions-has been undertaken since the 1950s in Budapest; the building and reconstruction of stadia and sports halls have been financed by the government and the sports clubs, but on a much smaller scale. While the introduction of “new” sports to Hungary and 9
