Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)
ment of the shipyard here was unhappy about the rowers and athletes who would keep getting in the way. Margaret Island Members of the Hungarian Athletics Club (MAC), established in 1875, initially held their open-air training sessions in the Orczy Gardens, and later had their first grounds built in 1901 at the south end of Margaret Island. On the terraces surrounding the football pitch and the 400-metre running track there was room for five thousand spectators, who had, on one occasion, a chance to see an international game besides the usual first-division matches. The superannuated buildings of the complex had to be demolished in the early 1930s for aesthetic and safety reasons. By that time the lease on the property had also expired and MAC had virtually become homeless. The long-standing club returned to the island in 1941, when a new lease had been taken out and a new complex of buildings designed by Tibor Hübner had been completed. The uniform, pure, modern appearance of the 2,500-capacity grandstand, the club house and the boat house, their red clinker texture is a fine match of the front of the Sport Swimming Pool overlooking the Danube, and is not out of tune with the natural beauty of the environment either. MAC could not, however, enjoy its new home for long. The club-house of the National Boating Association on Margaret Island (1936) 20
