Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)
L 1956, there were once again plentiful funds available for the purposes of building sports facilities. It was then that the handball stadium, the skating rink and the rowing centre were built. The Inner City On the Pest side let us begin our walk in the inner city, taken in its broader sense-in the quarter stretching from the Danube to the vicinity of the Grand Boulevard. This densely built-up area with its numerous apartment blocks, public buildings, small and infrequent green patches, and a closely woven network of streets is far two crowded to allow for the instalment of space-intensive stadia, sports halls or swimming pools. And it would be in vain, indeed, to look for facilities of that type in the heart of the city. There are, however, several buildings in these inner districts housing clubs where one can engage in physical activities which can be practised within smaller halls. On the Pest side, the majority of the incommodious rooms of the capital’s first gymnasts and then the halls of a higher standard built at the end of the 19th century were all grouped around the homes of the associations’ upper-class members. The best known of these is the former gymnasium-cum- headquarters of the National Gymnastics Association at No. 26 Szentkirályi utca. It was here that the “Hungarian Committee for the Preparation for the Olympic Games”, the predecessor of the Hungarian Olympic Committee (MOB) was formed in 1895. Most of the fencing halls opened in the heroic age of modern sports were also in the centre of the city. The fencing hall of GTE is still in use at 71 Király utca, where László Beöthy’s Király Színház or King’s Theatre had once been. At the beginning of the century there was a row of tennis courts in Boráros tér, which were turned into skating rinks in winter. As long as riding a bicycle was a costly pastime because of the high prices of the machines, and dogs set on the cyclists together with the stones thrown at them by street urchins turned it into a positively dangerous enterprise, the cyclists’ halls could make a decent profit in Budapest. A fine early specimen of Hungary’s sports architecture was 25
