Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

mid-seventies. On its site the Buda Skála Department Store was raised in 1976. The university club was allowed to build its new sports headquarters in Bog- dánfy utca. This centre includes a sports hall of a large floorspace, a football field with athletics tracks, and covered as well as open-air tennis courts. South of the facilities, on the Lágymányos campus of Eötvös Loránd (Jniversity (on a site originally reserved for a world exposition) stand the walls of the latest sports hall, its interior waiting for decorators to complete the construction.

A Buda clüb house that disappeared

On the area of today’s Moszkva tér there stood, from the end of the 19th century, the sports complex of the respectably traditional Budapest (Buda) Gymnastics Club (BBTE). In 1878, the association was among the first to acquire a permanent sports hall, in Attila út, and two years later it made a rudimentary skating rink in the same location (at No. 62). As the place fell short of the club’s expectations, it rented the plot lying at a deeper level in Széna tér to build its tennis courts in what was called the “pit”, which it turned into a skating rink in winter. In 1897 the club had the Beer Pavilion of the Millenary Celebrations transferred to the square for use, after some modifications, as its club house. The growing prestige of BBTE is suggested by

BBTE’s hall on Széna tér renovated in 1927

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