The Street as Palimpsest

Over the course of the past decade the area of district VII known as Budapest’s old Jewish quarter has been a scene of fierce battles between developers supported by a largely corrupt district government and those civic organizations that have been assiduous in their attempt to protect the district’s 19^th century building stock a large part of which has already fallen victim to the wrecking ball. The present architectural landscape of the district offers a unique palimpsest encompassing multiple layers of the district’s history from low-rise Neoclassicist houses erected in the first half of the 19^th century to recently completed multi-storey apartment blocks sporting vivid colors and large balconies with a Mediterranean touch. The mouth of Király utca at Károly körút all the way up to Kazinczy utca showcases ample examples of such new apartment complexes standing in stark contrast to their older neighbors. At the core of the upsurge of public resentment against these new developments stands the notion of preservation of the district’s pre-World War II architectural heritage perceived as a token of identity. By contrast, most of the demolition and the new constructions have been vindicated by the district government as part of the area’s overall rehabilitation. If rehabilitation is used as a euphemism for the destruction of the district’s organically developed architectural heritage, the concept of heritage seems equally vague when it comes to the actual identity that it allegedly signifies.

What constitutes this heritage then? Unlike in other European cities where Jews had built districts for themselves in the Middle Ages, here they moved into an existing texture of late-Baroque and Neoclassicist houses after having been granted the right to settle down in the second half of the 1780s. It was not until later in the 19^th and early 20^th century that rare architectural features such as “through houses” providing passageways and interconnected courtyards between parallel streets (as in the case of the Gozsdu udvar between Király utca and Dob utca) as well as buildings combining residential and industrial functions (like 11 Holló utca, known as silversmith’s house, whose demolition in 2004 incited a public outcry which led to the establishment of ÓVÁS! (VETO!) with the aim of preserving further demolitions) were built forming a maze of alleyways lending a pecuilar ambiance to the quarter’s streets. Ever since the early 1800s Király utca functioned as the single artery connecting the inner city with City Park. Although with the construction of Andrássy Boulevard in the 1870s the street was slightly alleviated from its heavy traffic, it still continued to serve as an interface between Terézváros (Theresatown) and the younger Erzsébetváros (Elizabethtown) forming the northern border of the Jewish district. Heritage value in not so much manifested in architecturally outstanding buildings with the exception of a few designed by prominent designers as in the peculiar streetscapes and layouts that speak to a bygone era of a vibrant community of merchants and craftsmen. But in spite of the international protection granted to the Jewish quarter by the UNESCO in 2002 as a buffer zone alongside the world-heritage Andrássy Boulevard, its protected status could not keep corruption at bay. The decimation of its 19^th century housing stock accelerated in the subsequent years until the National Office of Cultural Heritage, forced by public pressure, declared it an area of monumental historic significance in 2005 and extended official protection to 51 buildings.

Significantly, few if any of the activists dedicated to protect the old buildings are residents in the area. Other local forms of public involvement within the district have emerged but seem to be in embryonic stages. Conversely, however, the ambiance of the past afforded by the remaining old buildings has elicited multiple forms of nostalgia. The wide popularity of courtyard bars set up in abandoned interiors amid peeling plaster subscribes to such a nostalgic desire to connect with an imagined past through an environment pleasing in its evanescence. A complete opposite of the practice of façadism in which the façade of a building is preserved and new interiors are designed behind it (as in 12 Holló utca), ruinous courtyard bars feed on the uncanny combination of the archeological gaze and a carnivalistic pleasure of ruins—afforded by the precarious state of such buildings.

The peculiar ambiance that such places emanate derives from the surviving elements of the disorderly, maze-like arrangement of passageways that urban planners have sought to replace with a transparent pattern ever since the early 20^th century. The planning of a new boulevard (Erzsébet Boulevard) that would have connected the inner ring with the outer ring dates back to 1908 but its realization was thwarted by World War I. The idea would re-emerge in 1929 and 8 years later the so-called Madách Houses were built with a monumental arch connecting the two massive slabs of apartment blocks. Ironically, World War II withheld further construction of the boulevard into the Jewish quarter, leaving the grandiose structure as a monument to an ill-fated project. Although anachronistic in its inception, the idea emerged once again in the 1950s, however with the plan for the boulevard already reduced to a promenade. And even if a 12-storey office tower, built in the early 1990s blocks the way behind the grand arch of the Madách Houses, the idea for the promenade still persists as a formative element defining prospective plans for the area. In its present form the promenade cuts through the renovated courtyards of Gozsdu udvar and continues all the way to Kazinczy utca defined by the overwhelmingly Mediterranean look of the recently completed apartment blocks. Here the promenade is blocked by two old buildings in deplorable condition. The one on the left (47 Kazinczy utca) features a plaque, attached to the bare brick where the plaster had fallen off, declaring the house a protected monument—with its residents long ago evicted, just like in the neighboring no. 49.

Although not in the form of a monumental boulevard rimmed by modernist streetscapes as envisioned in the 1930s, the legacy of this project remains to be a haunting presence that exerts its influence on the blocks between Király utca and Dob utca in the form of demolition, facadism and, most prominently, new apartment blocks that rise above their older neighbors as harbingers of the quarter’s further gentrification.  The uncanny sight of the decrepit, abandoned Neoclassicist house with a plaque at its gate facing the grand balconies of the multi-storey residential block that could be anywhere in the world not only encompasses the radical confrontation of old and new but puts the possiblilty of communication between them at stake. For, within the mechanism of the power-relations that crystallized in the wake of demolitions, the “production” of heritage, as well as the historic character that it purportedly represents, takes shape as a desperate reaction to the imminent danger of its destruction. Instead of forming an “and-and” relation, old and new are pitted against each other in an “either-or” binary.