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

and tram Mo. 2 could now run all the way to the Pest end of Margaret Bridge.

It was in the building of the former Bristol that an although modest but new establishment, the Hotel Duna, was opened after the war. However, the bustling life of earlier times did not return to the promenade. True enough, it had nowhere to return to. The visitor arriving at Petőfi tér was greeted by the sad sight of the ruins of what was once Elizabeth Bridge - a lonely pylon and some suspension chains that had fallen into the Danube. Most of the buildings that had made up the hotel row, with the remains of the Hungária, the Dunapalota and the Carlton among them, had been pulled down in 1948. This had also been the fate of the Lloyd Palace, despite all the protestations of the monument preservation experts.

The railing once designed by Miklós Ybl was also torn to pieces in several places. The surviving lamp posts stood in the dark for decades without their lamps, like beheaded trunks. The remains of the Buchwald chairs were carted off to a scrap yard. Pál Pátzay’s statue Danube Wind was removed to be erected, like Senyei’s ornamental well, at the Dagály Spa in 1950. Across the river on the Buda side the despondent sight of the burnt-out Royal Palace and the ruined Sándor Palace (the building that had once housed the prime minister’s offices) struck the visitor standing on the promenade.

From 1949 on the darkness of the Rákosi era descended on the country. Developing the tourist industry and encouraging foreign investment were out of the question. It was not just the majority of its famous buildings that the Danube promenade had lost. It also ceased to exist as a focus of social intercourse. The promenade, this element of bourgeois life officially branded objectionable, was to be forgotten. The ground floor of the Thonet Court where the now defunct restaurants and cafés of pre-war times (the Pilsen Beer Hall, the Dubarry or the Ambassadeur) had been, was now turned into offices and storage facilities. It was part of this general tendency that in 1952 a new statue was set up in the square now named after Molotov. As the building of the First General Hungarian Insurance Company, burnt out during the war, had been demolished years earlier, the head office of the government bureau CJVATERV erected in 1951 on the spot where the Queen of England had been, received the street sign with No. 1. Today the building houses offices of the Commerce and

39