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

The Stein House and the Exchange

History of the Promenade from the Compromise of 1867 to 1945

The Compromise of 1867 gave an enormous boost to new construction work. Hungary, due to political stability and its gradual elevation to the status of equal partner in the dual monarchy, had entered a phase of substantial economic growth.

The land area created by filling the river bed by the Lower Danube Row was first divided into eleven building sites. Eventually a total of seven buildings was raised on ten sites between 1866 and 1872. The southernmost plot, the one bearing number XI, was left vacant, and was later to provide the space taken up by the square called Petőfi tér.

At the northernmost end of the row of buildings on the Pest bank the so-called Stein House was erected to plans by Antal Gottgeb in 1868. (The building acquired a tragic reputation when Pál Nyáry, formerly a respected member of the National Defence Committee of the 1848 War of Independence, took his own life here in 1871.) Owned by the grain chandler Náthán Stein, the five-storey apartment block, built in the style of early Historicism, featured huge, ornamental attic towers alluding to French architecture. The northern side and the main fagade overlooking the Danube were decorated, on the fourth-floor level, with caryatids (presumably made by Ignác Oppenheimer and Károly Turneszky). The Stein House was a rather shortlived building as it was demolished around 1910, the plot

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