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

giving onto the Danube that Privorszky’s Café was opened in 1869. Ferenc Privorszky was one of the period's best known café operators, who once owned several famously elegant establishments of this nature. He sold all his cafés so he could open this one on the Danube promenade. According to Imre Gundel, Privorszky furnished his new café overlooking the promenade with the most absurd extravagance. What with the construction underway in the neighbourhood, however, he had little custom, which is why the luxury business turned out to be a financial disaster. The citizenry of Pest was too slow to discover the promenade and by the time the café could have become financially feasible, it had gone bankrupt.

The Grand Hotel Hungária opened near the head office of the First General Hungarian Insurance Company, at the corner of the promenade and Kishíd utca (since 1908 Türr István utca). Its plans, like those of the Thonet Court, were made by Antal Szkalnitzky assisted by Henrik Koch Jr. The construction of the neo-Renaissance luxury hotel, financed by the First Hungarian Hotel Share Company, established in 1868, was completed in only three years. Costs were enormous, approximating the then staggering amount of one and a half million forints. The investment, however, had conspicuous results. “In terms of its furnishing and comfort, our hotel represents the best our age has to offer; besides the Grand Hotels in Paris and Vienna, there are hardly any in Europe that could compete with ours,” claims an 1871 issue of the Vasárnapi Újság (Sunday Hews). The claim was no journalistic exaggeration. The Hungária was not merely the most elegant hotel and, incidentally, the first six-story building, in Pest, but one that truly matched the finest luxury hotels in Europe at the time. The building, painted light red between its ashlars, featured windows with green shutters exuding an amicable atmosphere. Of the nearly three hundred rooms, 133 afforded a view of the Danube. There was a chapel on the fourth floor with a large altarpiece.

Above the restaurant there was the banqueting hall, a two-storey high room, accessible from the foyer via marble stairs. The thick glass ceiling of the banqueting hall was supported by twenty-four griffin statues. The stone birds thus supporting the brackets of the iron structure were designed, like the sculptural ornamentation of the First General Hungarian Insurance Company and the Thonet Court, by the Szandház brothers, whereas the ho16