Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

When the stairs move along. the escalators of Budapest

Hungary's first

In my childhood, it was Jules Verne and the sci-fi novels taking the reader from one space base to another in the future that enabled me to conceive of escalators and moving sidewalks. True, my father would tell us stories of how in Budapest's greatest department store - the one called Corvin - there had been contraptions precisely like those carrying people from one storey to another. But 1 had no chance to see these as they had been dismantled and taken away from the building, which had been badly damaged in World War II. In its time the department store itself was a unique place. It was founded by the German-based company M. J. Emden und Söhne in 1922. Zoltán Reiss's neo-Classical, four-storey building featuring an ornamental facade (which has been hidden under an unsightly aluminium casement for decades now) was completed in 1926. Its interior spaces, which have of a peculiar atmosphere, were decorated by Fülöp Ö. Beck and Szigfrid Pongrácz and included more than just retail activity. The building hosted fine-arts exhibitions and fashion shows, and there was a railway ticket office, a restaurant, a café and even an instant

■ The ótain of the Corvin Department Store were the hint to move

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