Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
The worker's colony of the Hungarian Railways
nursery school accommodating 60 children, a laundry and an ice-factory supplying the ice-boxes in the apartments with bars of ice. In the basement of the central building there were bathing facilities including a steam bath as a substitute for the bathrooms missing from the flats, and there was a restaurant, complete with a bowling alley, on the ground floor. On the mezzanine there was a club for civil servants, and the thousand-seat banquet hall was used as the venue of theatrical performances, movie showings and major social functions. The music box on the gallery provided entertainment for commuting workers while they were having their breakfast before the morning shift. There was a fourteen-thousand-volume library at the disposal of the workers’ literary and debating society-which functioned in the building together with other clubs—and several rooms set aside for educational courses. The women could work in the weaving workshops. The doctor's surgery was equipped with an X-ray machine and a quartz lamp, both regarded as rarities at the time. The estate had its own water tower. The community building had its own boiler providing hot water and steam for the heating system. Its chimney was hidden in the staircase shaft of the water-tower. No other establishment of a similar nature is known to me from the Europe of the time. Not even the paternalistic capitalists of England provided their beloved workers with the same level of comfort. Institutions corresponding to this one were not known before the "Hofs" named after the heroes of the labour movement appeared in "Red” ■ The Mávág housing estate (rom Vajda Péter utca 8
