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

pionships. Although there have been car and motorbike races held here as well as competitions and races for charioteers, pentathlonists, cyclists and runners, there is only one real sports building in the City Park - the skaters’ hall and the skating rink by the lake, a complex open from November to March.

Skating became really fashionable from the middle of the 19th century. Cold winters provided skaters with practically endless opportunities. The “better sort” tended to retire to the City Park, where the Budapest Skaters’ Association (BKE) installed its increasingly pretty warming rooms. Lower-class skaters, who were discouraged from coming by the high entrance fees, had to settle for the artificial rink in a far-away corner of the Park or similar facilities in Széna tér, the Népliget or the People’s Park, if they did not make use of the ice on the Danube or the ice made by water poured over vacant lots with their “slipper tree with the iron blade” strapped on.

The first warming room of BKE was built in 1870. As stipulated by standing regulations, the “wooden hut” was to be pulled down every spring to be set up again at the beginning of the season, which is why in 1875 the association had a permanent pavilion built to plans by Ödön Lechner.

Within a decade public interest grew to such proportions that room had to be made for another skating rink, all the more so as the ice on the lake was uneven and the thinner sections could be treacherous in mild

Ödön Lechner’s old skating hall by the lake in the City Park

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