Gábor Eszter: Andrássy Avenue – Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
here and there. The entrance to the City Park was also pushed further back. First it was the Palace of Arts, later the Museum of Fine Arts, for which large areas were taken away from the Park, and then, in preparation for the 1938 Eucharistic Congress, Heroes' Square was cleared of its green vegetation and paved over between the two buildings. The district planning necessitated by the construction of Andrássy út was not limited to the route itself but affected the neighbouring areas, too, as the project aimed at more than erecting a mere fafade of impressive buildings. The idea was to generate good vibrations into the entire district. For that reason the process of parcelling out plots included the Two Saracens’ Street (today's Paulay Ede utca) and Révay utca along the section closest to the Inner City. As for the outer stretch, parallel streets by the names of Délibáb utca and Lendvay utca were opened, together with the new cross-street called Bakony utca (today's Rippl-Rónai utca). Several existing side-streets were extended and widened. Parcelling out plots was implemented by Sugárút Construction Company in agreement with the Board of Public Works. The objective was to sell the largest number of plots possible for the best price, and the project was to be financed from the proceeds. With no project of similar proportions ever implemented in Pest before, demand and options were possibly miscalculated, and plots were undersized. In consequence, plots had to be reallocated when construction work was started, which involved the distribution of a few plots among other sites or the frequent joining of two adjacent plots into one to provide for sufficiently large building sites. (Buildings had to be renumbered twice before the opening ceremony of 1885.) Along the row of villas a more frequent procedure was the unification of plots one behind the other, which involved the annexation of a back-street plot to the one giving on the avenue. Regulations prescribing five-metre front gardens along the row of villas also provided fivemetre gaps to be left between adjacent buildings. Building sites thus reduced were hardly enough for the houses themselves, let alone auxiliary buildings, despite the fact that a stable and a coach house were essential with a villa of any serious pretensions. An easy solution was offered by the (cheaper) plots opening on the side streets where coaches and carriages could leave without crossing the more elegant sections. The farther away a plot was from the inner City, the lower its price was. While 3.57 square metres cost 500 forints at the corner of Váci Boulevard, the same unit could be had for less than 30 forints near the City Park. In a sidestreet villa plots went for as little as 20 forints per the 3.57 square metre unit. Construction work on the buildings started in the early 1870s. The first permit was issued for a block called Seven Houses to be built at the corner of 8
