Buza Péter - Gadányi György: Towering Aspirations - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)
44-46 Erzsébet körút, district VII Attorney Károly Baumgarten's luxury apartment block was also designed by Zsigmond Quittner in 1889. This, like the previous one, is a corner building. It has a unique spire, strikingly slender and tall, projecting its point up towards the sky. In the “good old days” this building also used to have a café on the ground floor, or rather a succession of cafés. The first establishment belonged to a certain Földe- si, the one following it to József Weiszberger, who assumed the management in 1910. Leó Berger, who owned the building for the longest period of time before its nationalisation, was also a café-owner. Berger was the one who named the whole apartment section Jókai Court in memory of the building’s most famous tenant. The great story teller Mór Jókai lived on the second floor from 1899 to his death in 1904. As far as the owner and his family are concerned, their fortune, as in the case of so many other apartment-block owners, had been based on corn-trading activities supervised by the leading member of the family Izidor Baumgarten as early as the mid-19th century. For decades in the last century, Budapest was the centre of the largest cornmilling industry in Europe, if not the whole world, with the majority of the international corn-trading companies being registered in the Hungarian capital. The assets thus accrued had sufficient time not only to be transformed into luxury apartment houses and mansions, indeed into a growing city displaying many aspects of a tastefully built, affluent metropolis, but also to be directed into the noble cause of mental and spiritual enrichment. For example, the profits yielded by this apartment building were to help finance the Baumgarten foundation, part of the estate of Ferenc Ferdinánd, the millionaire scion of the family. The foundation provided periods of secure livelihood and thus an opportunity to work in creative serenity for many a giant of Hungarian literature in the post-Jókai period. 18
