Porhászka László: The Danube Promenade - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)
number of foreign tourists, the interior design of Café Vigadó, another establishment operated by the Rónai brothers, was given an emphatically Hungarian national style. In 1934 the Association of Hungarian Engineers and Architects invited theoretical tenders, that is to say designs intended to remain unrealised plans, for the rearrangement of Vigadó tér and the adjacent section of the promenade with the aim of resolving certain aesthetic and traffic-related problems. The award-winning design by Dezső Cserba and Ágost Benkhardt would have doomed the structure housing the Hangli to demolition in order that the building of the Vigadó be given full justice. The plan would have sunk the tram lines as well as the motor road on the lower embankment into a tunnel beneath the surface. The tram stop at Vigadó tér thus hidden under the pavement would have afforded transfer to the planned terminus of the imaginary extension to the existing millenary underground railway, inaugurated in 1896 and called Francis Joseph Underground Electric Railway (FJFW) at the time. Rows of trees and parks would have been planted over the underground tunnel. “The cafés on the Danube will no longer be cooped up on the narrow and bleak terraces they haue today. Instead, they will cater for their ever increasing custom on giant terraces occupying the entire space which is now reserved for the promenade,” asserted Dezső Cserba in an article published in a 1937 issue of the journal Városi Szemle (City Review) about the advantages to be gained through the imaginary overhaul. The plan, like many of its predecessors, remained on paper. The trams still run on the viaduct constructed in 1900. The Hangli was also spared by the city planners, only to be destroyed in 1945. In the 1930s new works of art were unveiled on the promenade and in its immediate neighbourhood. A grey marble plaque paying homage to the German composer Richard Wagner was placed on the Türr István utca wall of the Grand Hotel Hungária in 1933. The small monument featured a bronze relief made by Antal Szécsi several decades earlier portraying Wagner glancing to the left. Guests attending the inauguration ceremony included local notabilities as well as the German ambassador. (The memorial plaque was destroyed together with the hotel in 1945.) Also by the building of the Hungária, at the end of Türr István utca, Pál Pátzay’s work Danube Wind was erected 29
