Gál Éva: Margaret Island - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)
boat houses a new, modern building was raised in 1936: the one owned by the National Boat Association was designed by Róbert K. Kertész, while the other, belonging to the Hungária Rowing Association was the work of Aladár Münnich. By 1941 the summer club house of the Scholarly and Casino Association of the National Officers’ Casino had been built to plans by military architect Captain László Czakó. Standing to this day, the exterior of the building is in a ruinous condition, its interior being furnished in the taste of the 1960s. The club house which is still managed by the army—as the Cultural Centre and Guesthouse of the Hungarian Armed Forces—deserves both exterior renovation and interior redecoration. As the plots left vacant by wartime damage decimating the boat houses are filled with rather ill-kept or completely abandoned tennis courts, this once elegant and lively part of the island makes a rather melancholy impression on the visitor today. Looking at the other side of the walkway towards the island’s interior, we see a no less depressing sight; the surviving units of the villa-complex built by Ybl, probably not renovated for decades, are in a sorry state of repair. To the south of the Seagull boat house is a well-house built in 1937; the establishment exploited the yield of the Magdalene Medicinal Spring whose thermal water shot up at a temperature of 69 degrees Celsius from a well bored a year earlier. What survived the war of the building was no more than the brick pavement of the terrace once located a few stairs above ground level. Aside from the view and the vegetation alongside the promenade on the embankment, there is only one feature lying to the south of this worth mentioning—the port, positioned in the same spot where the lower-island harbour once was, where boats crossing the river can put in. Having seen trials and tribulations aplenty, having enjoyed periods of fast growth and suffered heinous destruction, Margaret Island has not been seriously, permanently damaged by anything in its history. Neither wars, nor greedy development activity have been able to cause 59
