Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

Skaters on the artificial ice rink in the City Park

weather. In 1888 Antal Hofhauser raised an “auxiliary wooden hall” beside the artificial rink made at the end of the City Park nearest the Eastern Railway Station. By 1893 the new permanent hall that survives to this day had been raised by the lake. Built in an Italian pseudo-Baroque style to plans by Imre Francsek, the hall contained a spacious warming room, skate-fastening rooms, cloak-rooms, toilets and changing rooms in a sufficient number, but there was also a medical room to treat the clumsiest, and a separate niche beneath the dome for a band providing music. The most enthusiastic skaters could now enjoy their favourite sport at night, too, thanks to “twelve arc lamps above the rink and another eight in whose fairy light the fagade was enveloped,” as a contemporary journalist reported. During the Millenary Celebrations, the skating hall was used as the pavilion of the nautical exhibition. The bottom of the lake was given a concrete covering in 1908, and in the summer of 1926 cooling tubes devised to make artificial ice were sunk into the substructure; in November the same year the Műjégpálya, or Artificial Ice Rink, was in fact opened. Initially 70 by 80 metres, the ice-surface was later enlarged to nearly twice its original size. Although decades ago it was here that

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