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

tel’s stained glass windows were made by Zsigmond Róth. This formal atrium remained in use until the late 19h century, when it became defunct during internal reconstruction work overseen by Gusztáv Petschacher.

The hotel was equipped with the most advanced technology of the period. The main kitchen was in the basement together with the hotel’s own bakery and confectioner’s shop. The basement served as a huge larder and wine-cellar, not to mention a special ice room with its separate fish section and dairy chamber. Also here was the technical equipment servicing the hotel and the staff cafe7 teria. The ground floor provided space for eight boutiques as well as a restaurant and café. The conference and the telegraph rooms on the mezzanine catered for business- people. On the same floor were the barber’s and the ladies’ hairdresser's.

As well as a telegraph room, the grand hotel featured a lift, representing technology at its most advanced at the time. A brochure published in 1892 announced that, “a perfectly safe hydraulic elevator relieves our most distinguished patrons of the nuisance of having to climb stairs”. Installed at a later date, the hotel’s famous automobile turntable was another sensation. Türr István utca was far too narrow outside the main entrance to allow a car to turn around with any degree of ease, which is why the management had a turntable built into the street. This spared guests the trouble of having to reverse their cars.

However advanced, it was nevertheless not its technological innovations that earned the hotel its fame but its comfortable rooms, elegant furniture, gourmet cuisine and fine dinner services. Every guest received a daily issue of the hotel’s trilingual newspaper.

The Hungária was visited by a whole array of international celebrities. In 1877, Ferenc Liszt gave a concert here (a plaque was installed in the thirties in memory of the event). Other noted guests included Edison and Puccini, Richard Strauss and Vaslav Nizhinsky. Theodore Roosevelt, who came to Budapest with the express wish to meet the writer of St Peter’s Umbrella, received the acclaimed Hungarian novelist Kálmán Mikszáth in the Hungária.

Next to the Grand Hotel Hungária, in fact built onto it and in the same neo-Classical style, the Lévay House was erected around 1870 to plans by István Linzbauer. This was operated as an apartment building by its owner, Henrik Lévay.

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