Ferkai András: Shopfronts - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1996)

corner glass elements. The cast stone base and the advertising features are not perfect, either. What is even more depressing is that the original furnishings of built-in shelving, wall panelling and two cabinets with arched glass on pillars, which were still intact in the mid-1970s, were dismantled and mostly discarded. Some surviving pieces were taken to the Museum of Commerce and Catering. It is a pity the Salamander Firm had not returned to Hungary by then - it could have reopened its first outlet in Budapest in its original place and with its old furnishings and shopfront.

The frontage of the famous apothecary Neruda’s outlet in the inner city is similar to that of the Salamander in its composition. Nándor Neruda’s “medicinal drugs wholesaler’s” moved to 9 Hatvani utca (today 10 Kossuth Lajos utca in District V) in 1891. The iron-structure store occupying the entire ground floor was transformed around 1910 and it was then that its new bronze shopfront was built. The still-existing frontage, renovated in 1993, is also symmetrical, with its entrance in the middle between two spacious shop windows. The base of the shopfront is covered with metal plates and the lighting zone above the plate- glass panels used to consist of Luxfer glass prisms, but these were later replaced with coloured leaded glass during the renewal. The new shop sign, also made at that time, occupied the spot where the original one used to be, but its graphic design is not very successful. Bent panes of

THE RESTORED FORMER NERUDA CHEMIST’S

at 10 Kossuth Duos utca, V

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