Budapest Walks: Erzsébetváros

Spring made a tentative appearance today so it's time to take a break from boring everyone with opera reviews. Saturday lunch (yes, it was stuffed cabbage!) was digested with a quick stroll around the neighborhood:  District VII, Erszébetváros, Elizabethtown, named after the Empress Elizabeth, wife of Franz Josef. This is the smallest district in Budapest, just over 2 km square, and the most densely packed of them all, with 60,000 people crammed into it. You can walk the perimeter in an hour. It's kind of a mix of regular Joes and better educated, but not necessarily better paid, classes, with a contingent of students and ex-pat loafers thrown in as well.

It's also probably the most vibrantly developing district in Budapest, with an increasingly cosmopolitan flavor. Except for my first year in Bp in 1999, when I lived in the somewhat staid area near the Parliament, I've lived in District VII, first at the downtown end and since then on the City Park end, and it's changed enormously over that time, with bright new restaurants, cafés, and specialty shops opening in the storefronts, which used to be more dominated more by workshops in various degrees of defunctness.

And the development is not just on the downtown end either. On our local shopping streets, like István utca above, our shopping street one block over, we have several Chinese restaurants, including the Chinese restaurant that in summer feeds busloads of happy Chinese tourists embarked on one of their surveys of all the Chinese restaurants of Europe. We have a decent sushi place, we have a new Russian restaurant, and a Russian grocery and an Italian grocery among other delicatessens. Lots of pizza of various levels of mediocrity. Flagrant plugs: the best pizza in Budapest, for my money, is New York Pizza and the best Chinese is Master Wang's, both of which are a little further afield. We have the best cevapcici in town here though!

(Can you tell I got a new high-res cell phone camera? The only problem is I haven't learned how to keep my finger off the lens while I'm taking pictures yet.)

This part of the district was built very rapidly in the last decades of the 19th century, when industrializing Budapest was one of the most quickly growing cities in Europe. To accommodate the new demand for housing, the district was built out according to a modern grid pattern, which gave it the nickname Chicago.

A good example is our neoclassical building, above, on a street named after a famous veterinarian (not many countries, I wager, name streets after veterinarians, even if the famous veterinarian's soul is blessed nightly by millions of contented healthy chickens all over the world. The veterinary university, which has quite a strong reputation, is on the other end of the street, and attracts students from all over Europe.) Like other buildings in the area, the house was built and owned by a single wealthy family that itself would have lived on the second floor (which we call the first floor). The ground floor would be given over to ateliers or shops. The flats in the upper floors were rented out to more humble tenants.

Like most of the buildings in the area, it still needs a coat of paint, although we got the plastering done a few years ago. Hungary has an extremely high-rate of homeownership by world standards, owing to the conjunction of collectivation policies during the communist period and privatization policies immediately afterwards, but many of these homes are owned by elderly or otherwise hard-up persons with no significant cash income to speak of, hence the funds for major refurbishments in a cooperative apartment building like this one, for which usually repairing the facade is the last priority, after the roof, fixtures etc., has to come from municipal grants, which gives our local chiefs the opportunity to cultivate the patronage networks they love so much. It's happening, but slowly. On the bright side, the municipal government seems to have put a big dent in our graffiti problem, which had gotten so completely out of hand a few years ago.

And then there's the Garay fiasco. This used to be a run-down covered market serving the nearby area. The previous Socialist mayor (each district has its own mayor, which isn't a particularly efficient way to run a metropolis), who was involved up to his eyeballs in various real estate schemes and spent a couple years in jail, much less than he deserved, arranged for it to be torn down and the property taken over by a developer who, in exchange for building a new market and fixing up the facades of the adjacent buildings, would be able to develop luxury flats in the upper floors. I don't know who wants a luxury flat in the slightly dodgy area two blocks from the main train station, but somehow the corrupt ex-mayor's wife ended up with a good chunk of them (this happens quite a lot in this country: our politicians live very modestly but their spouses and often young children turn out to be exceptionally successful business operators. The new mayor seems to have cleaned things up somewhat.) They tried to create a mini-shopping mall on the ground and first floors in addition to the food market in the basement, but completely miscalculated the demand for retail space for what was, at the end of the day, a neighborhood market, and at least half of it remains empty including the entire upstairs floor. The food market does a brisk business though, mostly on Friday or Saturdays, and I'm on a friendly basis with many of the merchants. We'll visit there one day, maybe when I show you how to make a stuffed cabbage.

I've always like this eclectic building. Reminds me of the Kennedy-Warren on Connecticut Avenue in Washington done up Budapest style, and I wonder what it looks like inside.

The Square of Rose's Church, dedicated to St. Elizabeth (who wasn't an empress), and designed by the same architect who gave us our wacky overdone neo-gothic parliament building. Angelina Jolie and frequent Budapest visitor husband Brad had it blocked off with sandbags for a couple days last year when filming their Bosnian war film In The Land of Blood and Honey, which I'll maybe review here later, and you can see it clearly in the last few minutes of the film. I'm not sure there are too many Catholic churches in that part of eastern Bosnia where the film takes place, at least not dating from the era of the Austrian occupation, but who am I to nitpick with Angelina?

Now we're crossing the Grand Boulevard, which encloses the downtown area of the city. Behind the ubiquitous 4-6 tram is the New York Palace, which houses the New York coffeehouse, where the city's  artists and writers used to amuse each other around the turn of the century. Prices have increased considerably since then, but if you don't mind shelling out 1000 forints for a coffee it's a nice place to sit surrounded by frescoes and baldachins.

On the other side of the boulevard, we enter the older part of the district and the character, atmosphere and scale all change. The streets are narrower, curvier and darker. This is the old Jewish quarter, the focal point of the more religious and more working class components of Budapest's Jewish pre-war society, which is showing lots of signs of recovery today. It's also full of pubs and the outdoor beer gardens built into courtyards that should be opening for the season in a month or so.

The Great Synagogue is probably the chief tourist attraction in the 7th District. The largest synagogue in Europe, with a Jewish museum and holocaust memorial attached and, through a twist of fate, the birthplace of Theodore Herzl, conceiver of the modern Israeli state. I used to live right around the corner on the street on the left, but I only had a view of pigeons nesting in a lichthof -- a lightwell (one of the many German words dealing with urban life that made it into Budapest Hungarian). My next door neighbor was the head Lubavitcher rabbi for all of Hungary and he got the panorama windows to liven up his divinely ordained all-night boogie parties. Good thing no one lived under him. Where is the second largest synagogue in Europe? Answer: Pilsen. 

I've always like this prominently placed block of 1930s flats which I think doesn't have a proper name. Just the Madách Square flats. The arcades house cafés and a theater.

Now we're heading back out toward the Grand Boulevard on Király (King) Street. This is another street that used to be a little spooky despite running parallel to Andrássy Avenue. It's been fixed up (more or less, watch out for loose flagstones) and now houses some of the boutique spillover from Andrássy, art galleries and more pubs.

The Gozsdu courtyards are a series of 6 courtyards runing between Király street and the next street over. Originally designed as workshops and housing for local craftsmen, now they host more boutiques and pubs. Seriously, you wouldn't know the country has been teetering on the brink of bankrupcy to walk around this neighborhood. Walking through is kind of a thrill, although difficult to capture adequately in a photograph. It was even more thrilling before it was fixed up and there was nobody there at night except a chained up german shepherd to welcome you.

And back across the Grand Boulevard. Here is the city's first - or is it second? - Starbucks. I don't know what one of the joint (sort of) capitals of the Empire that invented the coffee house needs a Starbucks, but maybe that's what they think everywhere else too.

A few blocks up, at Lövölde "Arsenal" Square, where they used to keep the weoponry, Király Street turns into a bucolic country lane with villas, churches and schools on either side. There are embassies too, but only on the 6th District (Terézváros) side, which is known as the embassy district. For some reason the embassies are afraid to encroach on our side of the street.

The Lutheran High School was responsible for educating Nobel-winning mathematician Eugene Wigner, Nobel-winning economist János Harsányi, and Nobel-losing inventor of modern computing John von Neumann, all of whom I'm pretty sure weren't Lutherans, as well as numerous other luminaries, some of whom may have been.

And in case they felt unstimulated, atomic physicist Leo Szilard was growing up next door. I kind of like this house. Today the Liszt Music Academy is using it so little hope it will go on the market any time soon.

Now we've walked enough so it's time to pick up some cakes at Katalin Cukrászda, my favorite pastry shop in the area. Many of the cukrászdas truck in lacklustre cakes from industrial bakeries somewhere, but this is the real thing. A little bit pricier, but the crowds waiting on weekend afternoons seem to know the difference too. That's Katalin serving out the cakes behind the counter and husband Géza the chef on the right. I'd like 2 Pándi sour cherry cakes, please, and 1 Sacher, 1 melon cake and a "Katalin" cake! (I'm not going to eat them all myself.)

Mozart Marathon at the Palace of Arts

It looks like winter's about over here, a fairly mild winter despite a 2-week cold snap that supplied the international news machine with lots of photos of people and bodies of water looking frostier than usual in the middle of Europe, and before too long I might even venture past the city limits of Budapest for the first time in months, or at least my little winter world of the 7th, 8th and 13th districts (and now swimming laps twice a week in the 14th), and find something with more widespread appeal than operas and classical concerts to write about. But for now, that's what I got.

But everyone loves Mozart, right? Greatest composer who ever lived. Actually, I place him second after Beethoven on the grounds that Mozart (and Bach at no. 3) were, partly by virtue of some personal audio pipeline to the cosmic spheres, essentially elevating the music of their own times to towering new heights, whereas Beethoven, the human untouched by angels, grunting and shoving, scratching and kicking, virtually single-handedly birthed a new musical era. But being the second-greatest composer since Australopithecus first rattled some dry bones together is nothing to sneeze at either.

One wonders if it was Iván Fischer's or some marketing guy's brilliant idea to get the top symphony orchestras and other musical talent in Hungary together each year to run a morning-to-night program of mini-concerts each late winter dedicated to a single composer, for which we've had a Tchaikovsky Marathon, a Schubert Marathon, and a Dvorak Marathon, for all of which I always seemed to manage to be out town. And to sell the tickets for each really inexpensively (approx. 3 euros for any seat in the cavernous Palace of Arts Béla Bártok Concert Hall, buy 3 get one free). So when tickets went on sale one day last fall I was all ready except I got hit with some editing to do that morning and when I finally looked at the ticket situation early afternoon, the Requiem, to be performed by the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Fischer himself as the crowning highlight of the evening, had infuriatingly already sold out. But no matter, there was plenty to choose from, and since the whole thing was simulcast on our very own Bartók Rádió, so you can, at least for the next few weeks, listen to it all on their website while improving your Hungarian right here:

http://hangtar.radio.hu/bartok#!#2012-02-26

Which is how I got to hear the requiem in the end. (Most of the performances actually start a few minutes after their schedule times, so you have to fast forward through some babbling in Hungarian, and they really are babbling).

It was also interesting to hear how the various orchestras stack up against the other at close quarters. Perhaps in the Requiem you can hear how the BFO deserves its reputation as a world class orchestra and from the tempos he uses, Iván Fischer's as one of the world's most inventive conductors. If you live in a bastion of civilization you can hear them on one of their many tours sooner or later, or you can just come to Budapest. It's always a pleasure to witness them perform.

Also I think of world-class stature, especially in the liveliness and subtlety of their strings, is the Budapest Phiharmonic Society, the opera house's orchestra and therefore my home team, which also plays symphonic music when the mood strikes them. Here at 17:00 under the baton of white-maned János Kovács ("John Smith") they play the overture to the magic flute and the Jupiter symphony. Here I confess to another mistake, which was, in my effort to test out acoustics in different parts of the hall, I got tickets way in the back for this concert, whereas for this one we should have been sitting in the "organ seats" a few feet behind the orchestra to get the effect I heard Zubin Mehta describe once with respect to the convergence of themes at the end of the Jupiter, supposedly at the time of writing the most complex symphony ever composed to date, of the entire universe spinning around you, like some early Pink Floyd concert (he didn't say that last part).

For the 19:00 performance of the clarinet concerto and Ch’io mi scordi di te, we did sit in the organ seats for a great view of the soloists' backs, but I was impressed both with them and the Pannon Philharmonic from Pécs under András Vass. I've also always liked the clarinet concerto which shows a humorous side, written in Mozart's final year when he was supposedly staring oblivion in the eye with the Requiem and the mysticism of the Magic Flute, at least if you believe Milos Forman. On the other hand maybe things were starting to pick up and he just happened to get sick and die. Happened all the time.

The matinee performances by the Hungarian Radio Orchestra and Hungarian State Railways Orchestra were a notch down from these previous groups, a little harsh sounding, although the soloists themselves were perfectly fine. Judging by the names of their sponsors they are probably a bit starved for funds, although I've seen the locomotive fiddlers do solid work with lighter fare in the past.

A lot of us downtown cosmopolitan types don't like the Palace of Arts and the adjoining National Theater for complex political reasons dating from its fitful construction during the current government parties first stab at governing the country in the late 90s - the arts and politics are nearly always deeply connected in Hungary and this remains an ongoing story that I might discuss some other time - but it's starting to grow on me as architecture. I can think of no other examples of a modern public buildings that reach this level of lavishness in Budapest. Remind me to do a survey here sometime of post-1989 buildings in Budapest that I find to have real merit. It won't be terribly long.

But here, at least, the acoustics are great, as long as your neighbor doesn't start flipping through his program and humming along during the performance, it's helping revitalize this formerly industrial embankment of the Danube, and it's got one of the best views in town.

It really is a European-level arts center. I should tear myself away from my opera house a little more often and check out what's going on down the river.