Porhászka László: The Danube Promenade - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)
“What is the Danube promenade?" asks Sándor Márai in the 35th issue of the theatrical magazine Színházi Élet in 1935. Answering his own question, the famous writer provides this description of the esplanade: “Let’s say that it is a dozen cafés with music, pretty women, a cosmopolitan public and terraces all in a beautiful setting with the uiew of the Castle, Gellért Hill and the bridges. And yet there is something beyond all this, something nowhere else to be found in the world in this combination of elements. This show window of Pest, glittering and floating, as if on the very surface of the Danube, is metropolis and lido, salon and pier, St Mark’s Square and the Levant all in one. The place, elegant in its very vulgarity, surprising and charming, never before seen and instantly enchanting, has indeed no match in the whole wide world. ” The promenade on the Pest embankment of the Danube often changed its shape between the middle of the nineteenth and the thirties of the twentieth century and was to assume a radically different appearance after 1945. This work endeavours to trace the history of this unique ornament of Budapest from its beginnings to the present. Besides recounting the ups and downs in the story of the famous hotel row, the restaurants, the cafés, and the public monuments, the book tries to evoke the strange life and the historically changing atmosphere of the promenade. The beginnings A beautiful, neo-Classical row of mansions took shape in the Reform Age along the Pest bank of the Danube. The urge to build was given an additional boost by the Chain Bridge spanning the river nearby. The section of the river bank to the north of the new bridge was called the tipper Danube Row, the one stretching southwards the Lower Danube Row. Hotels were included in among the promenade buildings. The then three-storey high building at today’s No. 1 Akadémia utca housed the István Főherceg Szálló (Hotel Crown Prince Stephen) near to which stood the Európa Szálló (Hotel Europe). The familiar building of the old Angol Királynő Szálló (Queen of England Hotel) was built at the corner of today’s Deák Ferenc utca near the Danube in the 1790s. (The first of these buildings is still extant, while the second perished in 1945 and the third 5
