The Great Buildup of Budapest

The bloody liberation war against Ottoman Turkey left Buda-Pest in 1686 a deserted city with only a few thousand residents. It took a hundred years for signs of life to appear again. Queen Maria Theresa moved Hungary’s university from Nagyszombat (Trnava) to Buda-Pest in 1777, which boosted the city’s standing and population. By the turn of the century, Hungary’s Palatine, Archduke Joseph, requested that Emperor Francis hold the national assemblies in Buda-Pest instead of Pozsony (Bratislava) because he thought it was the true capital of Hungary.

This is to say: the first half of the 19th century was already a good one for Buda-Pest. The city was rapidly urbanizing and a beautiful Neoclassical housing stock was raised that’s still visible in downtown Pest. Many people forget this, so great was Budapest's transformation after the creation of Austria-Hungary, when the Habsburg Emperor-King, Franz Joseph, granted Hungary equal status in the Compromise of 1867.

This meant that Hungary became independent with newly created ministries that were based in Budapest. Austria and Hungary remained connected through shared military, foreign policy, and currency. Budapest, together with Vienna, became the co-capital of this Dual Monarchy and ballooned from a small, provincial town into a worldly metropolis within a few decades. From a population of 125,000 in 1850, Budapest became the eighth biggest city in Europe by 1900, approaching a million people (Buda and Pest, which are split by the Danube, officially became one city in 1873).

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The city offered attractive business opportunities and a less anti-Semitic environment than neighboring Vienna, which in turn drew many Jewish immigrants, and also German, Slovakian, Serbian, and Greek minorities. Nowhere was this more visible than in the construction boom that took place between the 1880s and the 1910s, when the number of buildings more than tripled to accommodate the swelling population and public administration.

The infrastructure projects comprised grand railway stations (including today's Nyugati and Keleti) and three new bridges between Pest and Buda (today's Margaret, Elizabeth, and Liberty bridges). In 1896, Budapest built the first underground subway line of continental Europe to transport attendees between the city center and the Millennial Exhibition in the City Park. Between 1896 and 1902, six indoor markets sprung up across town. As with the Great Market Hall, these modern structures made with steel frames and oversized glass panes replaced makeshift open-air venues.

With money and political power came the desire for monumental representation: public buildings and plazas emerged to parade Hungary’s newfound prestige. Down went the one and two-story flimsy houses – vestiges of a modest past many were eager to forget – and up rose the towering ministries and court buildings, immense bank headquarters, and gleaming hospitals, museums, universities, and national monuments (not unlike Haussmann's renovation of Paris a decade earlier).

Most symbolic of this transformation is the giant building of the Hungarian Parliament that dominates the Danube’s bank. This limestone-clad Gothic Revival spectacle took twenty years to erect and opened in 1904. Despite a liberal and secular-minded government, religious buildings were also boosted. The Saint Stephen's Basilica, completed in 1906, became the biggest church in Budapest, while the modest Matthias Church on the Castle Hill was unrecognizably embellished.

Private commissions were also ambitious. The aristocracy built giant winter palazzos – summers they spent in the countryside estates – behind the National Museum, which was the center of political life until the new parliament building was completed (hence the neighborhood's name today: Palace District).

The urban fabric of the city also improved. Taking cues from Paris and Vienna's Ringstraße, spacious ring roads, sweeping boulevards, and tree-lined avenues were built in the 1880s to improve connectedness and mobility. Most prominent was Andrássy Avenue, which links downtown and the City Park. It was named after Gyula Andrássy, the first prime minister of Hungary following the Compromise of 1867 and later an influential foreign minister to the Dual Monarchy (after several name changes during the Communist period – including Stalin Avenue – it's back to Andrássy Avenue).

Budapest’s new upper class commissioned many of these luxury buildings. Unlike the aristocracy, they consisted of businesspeople, often Jewish, but with a similar desire to display their wealth via Medici-type Revival palazzos. Today, with the original owners long gone – they were often persecuted by both the Nazis and later the Communists – Andrássy Avenue is home to high-end boutiques and embassies.

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The most important legacy of this period isn’t so much any individual building, although some are unique, as the eye-catching consistency of Revival architecture throughout the city. The whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. These three and four-story Renaissance and Baroque Revival homes still define the look of Budapest despite the fact that many were lost to World War II bombings.

One shouldn't forget about the Art Nouveau buildings that mushroomed in the last decade of the 19th century and provided an interesting contrast to Revival architecture. Using folk art motifs and the curvilinear vocabulary of the Art Nouveau, Lechner set out to create a distinct national Hungarian architecture. Lechner’s masterpiece is the Postal Savings Bank (1900-1901) in downtown Budapest, featuring his signature brightly colored tileworks, decorative brick patterns, and folk motifs. The best place to view it from is the top floor cafe of the Hotel President across from it. Lechner’s numerous pupils took his style in many directions. Béla Lajta designed some of the first early modern buildings in Europe around 1910, inspired also by Adolf Loos in Vienna.

It's can be misleading to compare the merits of different architectural periods because they’re born in different times, ideologies, and circumstances. It wouldn’t be fair, for example, to claim that these Austro-Hungarian buildings are superior to those built during the Communist period (1947-1989). What is true, however, is that the second half of the 19th century was a period of unprecedented economic growth and Budapest a regional hub. So a lot more was built then than ever since, with better materials and by a deeper bench of architects. Perhaps this is why I find the Revival style hard to resist – its grandeur, its consistency, its desire to impress.

But it would be wrong to idealize these buildings or the Austro-Hungarian period in general. While some apartments had 6-8 bedrooms and expensive fittings, others were much smaller, came without a bathroom, and looked over dark interior courtyards. Worse, housing was a privilege of those with money and plenty of people lived in unspeakable conditions on the city's outskirts, crowded into dark and cold and airless rooms.

Budapest’s turn-of-the-century housing stock hasn’t been treated kindly by later generations. In the Communist era, the state nationalized most residential homes by 1952, but didn’t have the money to provide even the most basic maintenance. To address the city’s critical housing shortage, they parceled up the apartments into smaller units, which led to ad-hoc and clumsy modifications and maddening layouts that continue to plague residents.

Another challenge is that Hungary’s national landmark protection agency has been hugely scaled back in the past decade and civil initiatives for preservation, which do exist, can only go so far. Restoration works have picked up somewhat since Hungary joined the European Union in 2004 and received funds targeted at refurbishments, but there’s a long way to go as anyone who walks around Budapest can tell. Especially in areas that lie outside the center and get less attention.