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

The Heinrich House (unter the Carlton) with the Petőfi statue in the foreground

In late 1860, the so-called Heinrich House was built at the southernmost end of the row, next to the Lévay House. Antal Gottgeb’s design was characterised by the neo- Renaissance, Historicist style of most of the other buildings on the promenade. On the ground floor of István Heinrich’s four-storey apartment building there was the Steingassner later Petőfi Café. This establishment was mainly patronised by middle-class guests, including women - a striking novelty at the time. Anecdotal evidence has it that the place was often visited by Kálmán Mikszáth and, before he organised his own table society in the Abbázia, Károly Eötvös as well.

Another sign of urbanisation was the fact that the Danube embankment, together with the streets Váci utca and Dorottya utca, received asphalt paving in 1872, among the first to do so in Pest. Tivadar Puskás’s epoch-making invention of the telephone exchange opened, after Boston and Paris, in the Lipót Town district of Pest at No. 10 Fürdő

18