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

The stadium in Újpest (view as envisaged by designer Alfréd Hajós, 1921)

boys of Újpest proceeded to float barrels and thus fabricate a 50-metre swimming pool in the bay behind the peninsula, which they enlarged to a length of 100 metres a few years later. The construction, sunk during the war, was replaced by the club with another, which, however, had to be disassembled on orders issued by the navigation company that owned the leased land. Eventually the Hungarian River and Sea Navigation Company gave the club notice to leave the premises in 1921, and CITE had to look for another facility. Fortunately, the proceeds of a public fund-raising campaign which attracted, among others, the sponsorship of major companies based in Újpest enabled the club to have a stadium, the first one in Budapest with reinforced concrete terraces, built on Megyeri út. Completed by 17 September 1922 to plans by Alfréd Hajós, the building was “a splendid, peerlessly impressive work worthy, in terms of statistical figures as well as outward appearance, of the stage of development the country’s sports life has attained”, aside from being a great feat of civil engineering. But like the others, this facility has not been able to avoid its fate in the form of accidents and reconstruction. In the summer of 1927, stormy winds swept its roof to the neighbouring slaughterhouse and in 1945 the gates were all but covered by floods.

A peculiarity of the Újpest stadium was the bicycle racing track built around the football pitch in 1925. The 450-metre track, which featured curves tilted at angles between 12 and 42 degrees to enable bikes to

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