Gerle János: Palaces of Money - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)
in-law, whose name the place bears today-Emil Gerbeaud. At the same time as the Commercial Bank was built, a head office for the Buda Savings Bank was also erected at the end of Fő utca by the entry of the Tunnel. The spot where this nobly proportioned three-story building, considered a novelty at the time, used to stand is one of the saddest places of Buda today. The structure, damaged by a bomb blast in the war, was pulled down in 1949. The space among the surviving arcades in its yard, a surrealistic stage of an interior turned exterior, was used as an espresso bar terrace for decades. What remained of the building after the espresso was closed down-bits of architecture marking a stage between Romanticism and neo-Renaissance in the work of the architect Miklós Ybl—is again a heap of war-ravaged ruins. Originally only the ground floor was used by the bank, the upper levels serving as flats. As dozens of other small banks, this one, too, was later transformed and operated under a new name-CInited Budapest Capital Savings Bank. Fay’s bank, the First Pest Domestic Savings Bank, issued a competitive invitation for tenders for the construction of its new head office at the corner of Egyetem (today Károlyi Mihály) utca and Reáltanoda utca. The fourteen competitors included Frigyes Feszi, who prepared his (fortunately surviving) plans immediately before he designed the Vigadó (Municipal Concert Hall). There are no extant documents to indicate that Miklós Ybl was among the entrants, but in any case he was commissioned to design the building which, boasting the most beautiful staircase in the whole city, was actually completed 1867. This is the most disheartening sight of Pest today; even though it is only a memento of neglect, the progressively deteriorating building, which faces an uncertain future, has stood empty and unused for ten years, thus becoming indistinguishable from the few isolated mementos of war in the middle of an inner city otherwise more or less adequately renovated. The structure, meant to house an Austro- Hungarian cultural centre or the Corvinus University among other things, now serves as an ideal location for shooting shocking films or producing alternative theatre performances. The ground floor of the wings facing the street was where customers were dealt with, while a separate section in the courtyard (to which another storey was added in 1884) housed ceremonial and conference halls. On 16
