Porhászka László: The Danube Promenade - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)

The Hangu’s open-air section with Senyei's ornamental well

the middle survives to this day.) On the ground floor there were a café and a beer hall. On the corner towards the Danube there was from 1885 the Szidon, then in its place from the beginning of the century, the CJlits café. On the south-eastern front overlooking Vigadó tér there was the Pilsen Beer Hall, which operated under various managements but had the same name for sixty years.

Besides the hotel row, the greatest aesthetic impression was made on those viewing Pest from Buda by the building of the Vigadó, designed by Frigyes Feszi. As the row of buildings was broken in front of the Vigadó, this Romantic pseudo-Moorish building, although standing in a street at one block’s remove from it, could become, or rather remain, an organic part of the Danube panorama. (The back and side fronts of the Vigadó were extended to plans by István Linzbauer in 1872.)

Interestingly, the oldest catering establishment on the promenade was unrelated to the hotels here. On the square outside the Redoute there was an unsophisticated coffee shop around 1850 with the name of Redout Glass Salon. The rapid growth of this little café started when Márk Hangi, Ferenc Deák’s bedroom waiter, took out a lease on the newly built Vigadó and the pavilion outside it in 1870. Although management would often change subsequently (lessees included Róbert Rémi and the Rónai brothers), the popular place kept the name Hangli until its destruction in 1945.

The glass-walled pavilion with its wrought-iron structure

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