Juhász Gyula - Szántó András: Hotels - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

The Metropol in the early 1900s

hall and a “csárda,” or mock country tavern, besides its existing restaurant. The open-air section in the courtyard earned the nickname “the Pest Grinzing”. Its beer hall remained popular with the Pest public well into the seventies. By the eighties, however, it had become just another of those faceless institutions with no charm or individuality.

In 1996 the establishment was closed down and its reconstruction began in 1999.

The MERCÜRE Hotel NEMZETI

No. 4 JÓZSEF KÖRÚT, DISTRICT Vili Built to plans by Ernő Schannen and originally called Rémi, this hotel opened in 1896 in the Grand Boulevard opposite what once was the People’s, later the National Theatre. Renamed Nemzeti or National in 1929, the hotel catered for the needs of the middle classes. Equipped with telephones, its centrally heated rooms, where hot and cold running water was also laid on, were “guaranteed to be beautiful and well-lit”.

The elegant furniture of its breakfast rooms, restaurants, its Dreher Beer Hall, and the private rooms where wedding parties as well as banquets could be held, reflected bourgeois tastes. Worthy of mention as a technical curiosity is a huge tunnel which was dug beneath the hotel. It was by way of this underground corridor that the stage sets and props assembled in workshops in a street behind the hotel were conveyed to the National

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