Gál Éva: Margaret Island - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

Club house of the National Boat Association (1936)

ing with the local fauna are kept under not particularly suitable circumstances. Entertaining as they may be to children, it is questionable whether these poor creatures should be kept in a zoo with such poor amenities.

The old, finely shaped trees around the south of the flower garden in a clearing called the Small Meadow are also worth seeing. These include a multi-trunked robinia, a double-trunked maple in the middle, and a so-called Maclura pomlfera tree bearing fruit that looks like some green, but inedible, orange.

Continuing from the end of the Small Meadow on the promenade running along the eastern bank of the island, we glimpse some more buildings and some deserted tennis courts. Here begins that stretch of the riverside where lovers of water-sports built the first boat houses. However, few of these have survived.

The very first boat house on Margaret Island, in operation as early as 1890, was installed right on the bank roughly in line with the villa on the lower island by the Neptune Budapest Rowers’ Association, itself established in 1884. The regattas held regularly from the 1890s on Margaret Island received lively coverage in the newspapers of the day. In 1902 the National Boat Association also built a permanent boat house on the eastern bank. This establishment was the northernmost sports facility on this stretch of the riverbank.

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