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Twenty years ago, I bought my first bike in Budapest from the Index web store (the great rival of 3D Népszabadság Plaza). The first online order of my life was a real impulse purchase after I saw the black telescopic Gepida on the cover. The purchase process itself was the pioneer of internet commerce in Hungary – it was first written that it sadly no longer exists. And then, however, they found a last one. I had to get tired of writing Index on Calle Victor Hugo, where the reception was recognized: Bicycle? What bike ?! Ah, what’s in the basement?
I paid over the top (strictly in cash) and then the receptionist walked me down to the depths. After some paralysis, we found the merchandise, not exactly ready. I had to shovel it together and then pack the parts into the trunk of a pickup truck … so it would stay in the kitchen for years after assembly, because except for a coy experiment, I didn’t venture into it. It eventually made it to Lake Balaton, and I only acquired its urban successor around 2004, with which I then rode the first Critical Mass, and then got used to the slowly consolidating urban traffic and dispersed cycling infrastructure.
Spaces, spaces, spaces!
What has changed the most in twenty years? The spaces. Nor can they be known. For twenty years everything, but everything was full of cars. Cars were parked and parked on all levels between Közgáz and the Danube. Cars in Freedom Square. There are dozens of long-distance buses on Erzsébet square, with cars all around. A column of smoking vehicles that stretched from Ferenciek square to Kálvin square in University square was waiting for you to turn towards the Erzsébet bridge through the huge underpass under Kossuth Lajos street, or to walk further towards the square Szabadság. How difficult it is for human consciousness to accommodate something other than the present is a good example of the fact that I have to specifically force myself to remember the Y-subway car, which for decades has been silly in the city center.
Remembering the conditions in Kossuth Square is somewhat easier: it was all a huge parking lot to park the vehicles of the MPs and their staff. Beside them, somewhere beyond the limp chains that line the huge parking lot, a line of visitors seeking to enter the dirty and worn building lingered in the wind, rain, and heat. (However, the underground reception center is more worthy of our construction poem, one of the top ten attractions in the world.)
Or there are the squares of my beloved Józsefváros: Rákóczi, Golgota, Calvary! Twenty years ago, it was the arid, unforgiving cement steppes of a slippery part of town, where even before night came the privilege of the strong and the brave was a ride. Today, the coolest squares and parks in the coolest part of the city. Even Baross Square, which embodies all the hopelessness and flaws of hyper-urbanization, became something (as did Széll Kálmán Square).
Losses
What has Budapest lacked most in the last two decades? Clearly, the Bárka Theater – both the building and the company – was the victim of Ludovika’s headquarters, more precisely of the transfer between Józsefváros and the Ministry of Justice. And the Snail Bar next to the Church of San José.
The natural-melancholic fluctuation of hospitality is shown in the destination of the favorite places of the early years of the capital. Even the winery restaurant on Dob Street called Green’s was the longest closed, maybe only closed a few years ago. There is no Suburban Café in Újpest, no Cha-Cha-Cha in the Kálvin Square underpass, no Mumus in front of Síp Street, no Merlin on Gerlóczy Street, no Public Gas Warehouse under the university, and where is it? the Külső Bécsi út Home Club, the one with its pulsating red entrance hall? Grocery stores couldn’t take the mud any better, the Rotschilds in Kiskörút and Smatch in Ferenciek Square are nowhere to be found, and Julius Meinlek has been sucked in.
Stable points and benefits
On the other hand, there is Cinnamon on the site of the former Papageno on Semmelweis Street, Fellini Culture Bistro in Rome, Kiosk on the Piarist block, Moné on Main Street, Cabin on People’s Island. And in the last place, there are the seemingly eternal infallible spots, the Iron Cat or the Island Buffet, and the Hawaii Camping, on which I have not been able to decide for twenty years if it is closed or something like that. The constancy is also represented by the showroom of one of the mobile operators, which is still in the same place of the Astoria, its offer has changed radically, like the world: 20 years ago it was available from German, Swedish, Finnish phones (and Americans), today Chinese, Koreans (and Americans).
Budapest 2020 is still basically about restoring the old greatness, renewing the built heritage ravaged by wars and socialism, and only to a lesser extent creating new things. The dignified arrangement of the Castle Gardens Bazaar, the Károlyi Garden or the Museum Garden used as a car park as a symbol of the total car reserve is at least as important as the birth of Millenáris Park.
What did we get with what is not renewal? Among the new buildings of the last two decades, between public institutions and commercial properties, they have done really well: for example, the Egeraat house on the square from ’56 or the Vörösmarty house No. 1 on the site of the old ORI headquarters. The Budapest Sports Arena, the Groupama Arena and the Puskás Stadium (on the contrary, it is the Danube Arena of this genre), the MÜPA (counterpoint: National Theater). We have also received good monuments and museums of our century, the monument of 56 and the House of Terror can be listed here as well as the Union Memorial at the end of Constitution Street.
However, for true peak performance, we must go underground, and no matter how great friends of the Fourth Meter, we must accept that greatness is often extravagant. The M4 stations have done incredibly well, few cities have similar stations. The output of such giga-enhancements often dance to the limit anyway. I’ll be very curious, for example, about the fate of the Pannon Park biodome: a loopy, “iconic” (brrr) building can be like a soggy, cracked operational nightmare that embodies megalomania.
If we think of the less tangible public services, night public transport should definitely be mentioned. Does anyone else remember how desperate it was to catch a bus home the night before the big VEKE reform? Nowadays, you can reach almost anywhere even after midnight in an hour, and the 4-6 runs day and night. And if you have transportation: Batthyány and Kossuth squares will hardly be better than anywhere else in the world than a metro. Subway replacement ship! At the same time urban and lyrical.
Desolation and greatness
Our newly constructed residential buildings, on the other hand, are much more dramatic, unfortunately. I simply cannot speak of a house that I could imagine that a hundred years from now hundreds and thousands of people interested in the current offer of Budapest100 would visit me, admiring the greatness of the old days. What could they see? The neopanels of Marina Part? Or one of the facilities maximized by Hungarian-Mediterranean square meters in the Jewish Quarter? One of our most beautiful industrial monuments, the phalanx-shaped monsters built around the brutally demolished public slaughterhouse?
Or do we have a single mall that we think you have? However, over time, the department stores of Paris, the stock exchange, the Gresham or the palaces of the Adriatic were also born for a for-profit institution. Or is it simply that we are blind to the values of new buildings for decades to come? It is a thought-provoking reading, as Oradea’s contemporary press scolds Art Nouveau buildings and laments everything in front of them.
But gloomy real estate developments here or there, Budapest is an incomparably better place today than it was twenty years ago. Almost reminiscent of the traffic of a small city, with well-cycled downtown streets, a fighting but good life, an incredible cultural offer, all in an almost fairy-tale setting. What I mean? There is no simpler and more ordinary part of the city than the Petőfi Bridge. And yet, as you go through it, it is part of a spectacle as if you were watching a kitschy demonstration of some city-building game: river and bridges, mountains and islands, statues, castles and palaces. A true unimproved imperial capital.
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