Buza Péter - Gadányi György: Towering Aspirations - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)
19 Rákóczi út, district VIII The building where the King Matthias inn opened in 1830 had been erected in the late 1700s. The celebrated actress Mrs Déry would often stay here on her visits to Pest (although her carriage was broken by the collapsing roof of the coach-house on one occasion, she had more pleasant experiences with the establishment, too). The renowned place, already styling itself café, saw its heyday in the 1870s, after which nothing might have changed had it not been for the opening in 1894 of a competitor in the neighbourhood called Balaton, which proceeded to lure the Matthias’s fickle patrons away with its fashionable novelties. Fittingly, the building itself was doomed. Soon after the turn of the century Slovak workers, the official demolition experts of old Pest, raised their pick-axes against the establishment and the plot thus left vacant was ready to greet a new owner and a new business. It did not have to wait for long. József Jahn, a hardworking master builder who lived in Damjanich utca, decided to invest the earnings of a lifetime into an apartment house. Accordingly, he commissioned the contractors Schubert and Hikisch to design a multi-storey building on Rákóczi út. As a discreet allusion to the prehistory of the house and in a gesture attesting to his refined tastes, Jahn agreed to the commissioning of sculptor Ede Mayer to prepare a figure of King Matthias to pay homage to the restaurant in the old building. The statue, four metres tall together with its plinth, was placed on the first-floor level. The building was completed in 1905 and, now that the reminder was on it anyway, a new café, called Magyar Királyhoz (To the King of Hungary) was opened on the ground floor. It functioned until 1925. What survives to this day is only the statue and the metal dome high above. The latter is a strange, peerless roof ornament - there might be others similar, but not in this category, not in this size. Ármin Schubert, Lajos Hikisch and their descendants could indeed be proud of this work whose design reveals their makers’ intention to surprise (as do other works by the same architects discussed below). 46
