Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)
Steps udbounded - the Budapest embankments
chief designer Attila Komjáthy, the reconstruction managed to provide the architectural monument with rentable office space not only without depriving the building of its former values but in fact highlighting its finest features - such as its staircases - by raising them to a much-deserved elevated status. The building, which had been allowed to deteriorate for decades, is among the finest ornaments of the inner city. Steps unbounded - the Budapest embankments Cited in its entirety as an item on the UNESCO World Heritage List, the panoramic view of the Danube’s Budapest banks - the harmonious unity made up of the wreath of hills along the riverbed and the architectural environment - rests on the foundations of the century-old feat of engineering commonly known as the embankment with its specific sections identified with specific sobriquets of their own (such as the Gellért Embankment, the Belgrade Embankment, etc.). Structurally it is made up of two levels, the one closest to the water being called the lower embankment. At the time Budapest was emerging as Hungary's unified capital, the banks of the Danube were in a state of complete neglect. The riverside strip, whose width depended on current water levels, was used as a refuse disposal area, with rubbish regularly dumped into the river. Pál Vásárhelyi called attention to the threat of a major flood and the urgent necessity of controlling the Danube before the icy deluge of 1838 devastated the city, but he was ignored. In 1847 two engineers worked out plans for the regulation if the river's flow, but work was still not undertaken. Eventually, it was in the vicinity of Chain Bridge, a construction completed in 1849, that the regulation of the Pest section of the Danube bank was started in 1853. The job was undertaken on the initiative of the Danube Steamboating Company to facilitate the loading and unloading of cargos. The length of the embankment thus constructed reached as far as Zoltán utca in the north and Petőfi tér in the south. The precise mode of construction was stipulated in 1897 by the Budapest Board of Public Works, who specified the sections where and in what length the builders were to employ ramps and where they should build stairs-, "a staggered bank at the Gellért Embankment with a perpendicular wall away from the river, on the upper embankment from Margaret Bridge to the Viktória Mill a common stone-faced ramp interrupted by a 5-metre wide section of stairs at every 50 metres and a perpendicular wall away from the river, while from the Viktória Mill to Dráva utca both by the water and away from the river a common ramp interrupted by a 5-metre wide section of stairs at every 50 metres." 37
