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

The “Münchengrätzi” shoe shop in the early 1930s at 15 Kossuth Lajos utca, V

do only in the “good old days”. Today, when fast food places selling hamburgers day and night supplant outlets that have seen better days, even a cheap uniform will do.

On the shopfront of the shoe retailers at 15 Kossuth Lajos utca in District V a sign saying “designed by Gábor Forgó and József Keller, 1937” can still be seen. However, the shoe shop is older than that. At the beginning of the 1930s there was already a modern shopfront here. It was built to plans by the renowned architect and designer Lajos Kozma for Adolf Weisz, the only trader selling the products of the Münchengrätz Shoe Factory Co. The exquisite marble-bronze frontage was composed asymmetrically - solid marble surfaces and advertising features placed on different planes counterbalanced the lowered show-case. After a short while the shop turned out to be too small - there was no reason to grumble about trade in Kossuth Lajos utca even then - and the company, which was then limited, requested the enlargement of the premises. In the process of rebuilding, the elimination of Kozma’s shopfront built just a few years before, was unavoidable.

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