Porhászka László: The Danube Promenade - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)
tlemen enjoyed strolling past the newly built row of mansions. As a series of water colours by the painter Miklós Barabás suggests, these early promenaders did not mind having to thread their way around carts or take their refreshments at the stalls of street vendors, squatting on low stools rather than in chic cafés. And yet it became fashionable to be seen here, to walk up and down the promenade and to exchange greetings with other strollers. And strolling was something that everyone could afford. This gradually emerging, curiously democratic form of social interaction created something in Pest that can only be summed up in the word promenade. The colourful life of the Danube embankment in the Reform Age was evoked in an interesting way by Jenő Haranghy in the summer of 1946. The artist created four large tapestry-like murals to decorate the interior walls of the Corso Restaurant in Petőfi Sándor utca. These wall paintings, still in evidence, suggest something of the mood of the embankment in the first half of the 19th century. During the War of Independence and the retaking of Buda Castle by Hungarian forces in May 1849, General Hentzi, the commander of the Austrian troops defending the Castle, had the defenceless row of mansions destroyed by artillery fire in revenge. “Along the wonderful Danube row, a sight comparable in beauty to the face of a smiling young lady, thirty-two mansions stood in ßames at one and the same time; among these was the Redoute building, the historic venue of the late Parliamentary session; the colonnade lay in ruins with its arches shattered, ” is how the sorry sight was described by the writer Mór Jókai in his novel The Sons of the Stone-Hearted Man. The three-storey Hotel Crown Prince Stephen, which housed the offices of several government ministries in 1848, was subsequently restored, but it would no longer receive guests. The Queen of England on the other hand was rebuilt to plans by József Hild in 1851 and with its fine, original English furniture the hotel radiated the same calm that had characterised it before. This was where, for fifteen years, the statesman Ferenc Deák, architect of the 1867 Austrian-Hungarian Compromise lived. József Hild was, in 1853, the first to design a building with entertainment facilities meant to take the place of the ruined Redout; and in another five years Frigyes Feszi was 7
