Budapest 1900

This is that in Hungary, as in so many nondemocratic and partly feudal societies, there was not much difference in the diet of the otherwise so very different classes.

Within a few months the Gallery of Fine Arts, the palace of the High Court of Justice, the first electric underground tramway line, the last stretch of the Pest Ring boulevards were completed, and the building of the new wing of the royal castle had begun.

Twenty years later, in 1892—on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Compromise, and of the Hungarian crowning of Franz Josef I (ceremonies that, in 1867, took place significantly in Pest as well as in Buda)—an imperial and royal decree proclaimed Budapest to be a székesfőváros, a capital and royal seat, equal in rank to Vienna.

In 1815, during the Congress of Vienna, Metternich was supposed to have said to one of his visitors as he pointed at the dusty road stretching away from Vienna toward Hungary that Europe ended there.

from the Great Compromise to the Great War, from 1867 to 1914, Budapest was the fastest-growing city in Europe, even though after 1900 the birthrate of its population had slowed down.

One of the aspects of the late nineteenth century, evident in many of the surviving photographs, is the relative absence of crowds. Ortega y Gasset began his twentieth-century classic, The Revolt of the Masses, with that observation.

Indeed, when Imre Steindl’s Parliament was completed in 1902, it was the largest parliament building in the entire world—and an eclectic combination of Magyar-medieval, French-Renaissance, Westminsterian neo-Gothic, with a neobaroque ground plan, and much polychrome inside.

the Magyar national character inclines to pessimism, not optimism

Unlike in Paris—but, mutatis mutandis, not unlike in Vienna, Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon—Hungarian eclecticism included the neo-baroque style, too, for which Hungarians had a particular national as well as aristocratic attraction (we must keep in mind that in 1900 the word “baroque,” in French and English, still had a pejorative connotation).

Starting from the edge of the Inner City, the first portion of Andrássy Avenue was typical of the Central European Gründerzeit, the building wave of the prosperous period 1874-90: monumental apartment houses, Germanic-neoclassical rather than Victorian, the palatial mansions of insurance companies and, in 1884, the Budapest Opera House.