Gábor Eszter: Andrássy Avenue – Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
All the average person saw was that Andrássy út was passé rather than modern, while looking elsewhere for an apartment. (Soon enough Art Nouveau also went out of fashion as seen with the example of the Babocsay Villa.) It was possibly due to the ascendancy of the new tastes that the avenue lost its former lustre. A few houses, whose walls are known to have originally been covered with rough brickwork, were later given a uniform plaster coating (these included the buildings of the Oktogon, such as No. 126 Andrássy út, the Weninger Villa and the Révay Villa at No. 125 opposite these, but perhaps there were other instances, too.) Kauser’s building for the Pensions Administration of the Hungarian Railways has fortunately been spared. Rauscher's sgraffiti disappeared from the Edelsheim-Gyulay Villa decades before the building itself was demolished, but its counterpart on the Railways Palace also survives. The forty years following World War II represented a period of poverty and neglect. The apartment houses, which were often used for offices were hardly at all maintained but were irresponsibly converted here in this way, there in that. The buildings gradually fell into disrepair. Abundance there was, but only in terms of new street names. On 21 December 1949, on the 70th birthday of Stalin, the avenue was given the name of Stalin, which it bore until October 1956. Then, for a short time, it was called Hungarian Youth Street, only to be renamed once again and become, in 1957, People’s Republic Street, which it remained until 1990, when it eventually got its original name of Andrássy út back, which it had been informally called all along in any case. The life of the avenue also changed as the elegant procession of coaches was replaced in 1919, and sometimes during the interwar period, too, by parades and demonstrations. On 1 May 1919, the crowds marched from the city to the Millenary Monument, covered with decorations for the occasion; to mark the visit of the Italian monarch Victor Immanuel II, the multitude moved in the opposite direction from the Heroes' Square and past the grandstand erected on the Körönd. From 1945 to the mid-fifties — when Dózsa György út was broadened out for the purpose — marches were usually routed from the city to Heroes' Square. With the advent of the new era after 1990, the prestige of the old, historic houses grew considerably. Companies, businesspeople and private individuals tried, in growing numbers, to buy a house or at least a flat on Andrássy út. The fad started a new wave of ruthless modernisation destroying whatever had been spared by the previous decades. Glass boxes are built on the tops of buildings whose proportions were once carefully balanced (No. 9 Andrássy út), addi tions in front, on top and in the back are made without the slightest regard to considerations of style (No. 112); it has to be considered as the lesser of possi
