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

guests. Of literary historical interest is that between 1910 and 1930 a private room of the Bristol hosted sessions of the Nyugat (Occident) circle, comprising editors, contributors and readers of the epoch-making literary magazine. Endre Ady, the legendary poet-prince of the period, also featured among the guests in the first years of the century.

In 1900, the year the old century turned into the new, a new means of public transport made its first appearance on the embankment - the tram service started. Of the two competing transport companies, the Budapest Street Railway (BKVT) and the Budapest City Electric Railway Company (BVW), the latter was commissioned to build and operate a tram line along the Danube embankment. As there was no room for the lines on the promenade, the track had to be fastened to three rows of riveted iron pillars virtually forming a 498 metre long viaduct, under which the above mentioned storage facilities opened onto the lower embankment. The first tram ran the length of the 1009 metre stretch between Petőfi tér and the Academy of Sciences on 20 October 1900. For these trains, BVW acquired new driving units which, with their 30 hp performance, were more powerful than the company’s existing motor carriages. They were painted yellow (as opposed to the brown of the BKVT carriages). Due to aesthetic considerations, the power lines ran between the rails, but frequent technical break-downs caused by adverse weather conditions in winter made inevitable the instalment of the upper power lines used to this day. (The tram line has periodically come under criticism for disturbing the quiet of the promenade.)

The path of passers-by was separated from the tram line by a carved stone banister and a cast-iron railing. The railing and the candelabra, the latter part of the former, were designed by Miklós Ybl to replace a neo-Gothic trellis-work.

The inauguration on 10 October 1903 of Elizabeth Bridge, at the time the structure with the largest suspension span of all the chain bridges in the world, had a huge impact on the development of the promenade. The bridge, designed by a team of architects under Aurél Czekelius and completed in six years, was rightly called the queen of the Danube. From this time on the natural end-points of the promenade were no longer the Eötvös and the Petőfi statues, but the most beautiful means of crossing the Danube in the capital, the Chain Bridge, called Széchenyi Chain Bridge from 1898, and the Elizabeth Bridge.

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