Porhászka László: The Danube Promenade - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)

naments by Károly Alexy and János Marschalkó, while the twenty-seven murals decorating the walls of its ornamental staircase and banqueting hall were made by Mór Than and Károly Lotz.

A restaurant, beer hall and café were on the ground floor, behind the archway of the five-aperture main faqade. North of the first-floor banqueting hall was the Csemegetár (Delicacy Store) or the buffet, one of its walls being decorated by Mór Than’s The Feast of Attila and another by the huge painting Mátyás and Holubár, a large-scale work of Sándor Wagner. Originally there was an additional restaurant operated by the Csemegetár. The banqueting hall of the Vigadó, a room whose acoustics was a frequent target of unfavourable criticism, served as the venue for concerts given by such musical celebrities of the age as Ferenc Liszt, Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler.

In addition to concerts, the Vigadó was the venue of numerous social events. It was in the banqueting hall that the grand feast marking the coronation ceremony of Francis Joseph 1 and his spouse Queen Elizabeth was held on 9 June 1867. The room would see many more events in later times, too, ranging in variety from musical concerts of a serious nature to music-hall shows, from lottery games to political meetings.

Learning from the disastrous events of the 1838 flood, the First Danube Steamboat Company and the municipality of Pest started building an embankment in the region of the Chain Bridge. Between 1865 and 1866, the embankment between Zoltán utca and today’s Petőfi tér, providing safe protection to the present day, was constructed to large-scale plans by Ferenc Reitter.

The resulting installation was more than a flood-control mechanism and embankment, as the land-fill operations created a new river bank. The municipal authorities were faced with a dilemma: they had to decide whether to let Palatine Joseph’s and István Széchenyi’s dream of a spacious tree-lined esplanade by the river come true or to parcel out the newly created land to have lots for a row of buildings. As so often before and after, financial considerations were given priority over popular demands for trees and parkland. Construction work commenced on the exorbitantly priced sites on the land conquered from the Danube.

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