Holló Szilvia Andrea: Budapest's Public Works - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)
Natural or artificial?
graphical work, "there ii no shortage of drinking water here with almost every house having its own weit. " Those who did not happen to own one purchased Donauwasser or Danube water sold from water carts or butts. (Mór Jókai believed that the "Donauwasseryelling at the top oft their voices to remind the citizenry to procure their ftresh Danube swill" would not permanently disappear from the streets of Pest before the construction of the city's waterworks.) Supplying water to the rapidly growing Pest, which was way ahead of Buda in terms of industrialisation, had become well nigh impossible by the middle of the 19th century. The loose alluvial soil had become saturated with pollutants, the water of bored wells contained increasing amounts of nitrates, and the sewage flowing into the Danube made its water unfit for consumption. Governor Albrecht of Habsburg commissioned Professor Ludwig Förster of Vienna in 1856 to work out a solution of ensuring the city’s water supply and to prepare a draft plan and a budget. The professor, who was the chairman of the association of Austrian engineers and the architect of the Great Synagogue in Dohány utca, suggested that water should be pumped from the Danube into a reservoir at the Tüköry dams along the line of today’s Szent István körűt where the river ran as yet relatively clean. The water would then be artificially filtered and then distributed from the cistern by way of cast-iron pipes. The city was prepared to give up the municipal plot between the railway track and the Danube for the purpose but in the absence of funds the implementation of the plan was continuously postponed, and Förster died in the meantime. Dr Károly Siklóssy, founder of the City Manor (Városmajor) medicinal- water institute, intended to revive Forster's idea in the sixties, and his initiative enjoyed the support of Mayor Lipót Rottenbiller. Another three plans were then drawn up for the securing of the city's water supply-. Chief Engineer of Pest Gyula Pollák and the Vienna-trained master well-digger Antal Bürgermeister both recommended a natural system of filtering, while a London-based firm made its bid for artificial water-purification. The site where the Parliament Building stands now and which was used by the Navigation Bureau at the time was selected for the purpose, but the funds for starting construction were not available at that time either. What the temporary waterworks of Pest owed its existence to was the urgency felt after the outbreak of the 1866 cholera epidemic prompting the city to take immediate action. The experienced entrepreneurs of Vienna and Pest wasted no time responding, but the general assembly of Pest declared its intention to build the works out of its own funds and also to undertake its management relying on intramural resources. The foremost waterworks engineer of the age, the Englishman 53
