Different cities

Bauhaus is our house: our block.  

At the start of the new year, we moved to a new neighborhood. And Budapest being what it is, that means we basically moved to a new city. Famously, Budapest is the late 19th century merger of west-of-the-Danube Buda -- medieval, conservative, Hungarian -- and east-of-the-Danube Pest -- modern, progressive, international (always overlooked is Obuda, which is ancient and out of the way). The differences between each part survive in very real ways, and the experience of living in each has been like living in different cities.

We went from the I to the XIII district, or kerulet. Straight away, I have to say that the Budapest kerulets -- unlike the famous and more or less sensible arrondisement system of Paris -- is too arbitrary and weird for me to figure out. I'm a person who is pathologically unable to remember street addresses or telephone numbers because they are just random numbers, so the oddity of the Budapest system is hopeless. Consider the IV kerulet, which covers the extreme northern district of the city, and was given the number after the original IV kerulate in the center was merged out. It's kind of nonsense.

Anyway, while I've learned to say that we live in the XIII kerulet, in my heart, we actually live in Ujlipotvaros, which translates as "New Leopold Town." This makes sense to me. It is right across the korut -- the main ring road of Pest -- from Lipotvaros.

The neighborhood is relatively new, but has packed in quite a lot in its dense history. The area was a pretty drab industrial district until after the First World War, when it was built up very quickly. At the time, Bauhaus was the fashion, so it is like a giant museum of interwar, central European style. You see it in the stylized balconies and doorways, the sterile but stylish geometry of the buildings. This was, by necessity, Bauhaus as style, not as philosophy of living -- the area is far more dense than strict Bauhaus would demand.

Lines: Szent Istvan Park.

It fast became a region for the urban intellectual class. It was Jewish, and it was socialist. The street we live on, Pozsonyi ut, was the center of the region, and it still shows with the greatest mix of shops and restaurants. It was a who's who of places. A building on our block was the home of Anna Kéthly, the interwar socialist leader. Tom Lantos, the late Hungarian-American congressman, spent his childhood nearby. According to rumor, many of György Lukács' students lived in the neighborhood.

The statue of Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs at Szent Istvan Park.

Today, it reminds me the most of the Upper West Side, as it was in some idealized 20th century version before middle class knowledge workers were shoved out to god knows where. It is a long, narrow strip of a neighborhood, bordering a great river on one side, but instead of a park on the other, we have a railroad that separates the area from the more dense Terezvaros neighborhood.

After more than a month, I remain fascinated by how different it feels from our first place. When we arrived, we stayed in the I ker., in a place near Castle Hill. It felt like we were staying in a hotel in a historic district. Aside from the fact that it wasn't very fun to hike uphill with groceries, it was a quiet place, disturbed only by the regular rumble of tour buses. I can't deny that it was beautiful, and it felt in many ways more like "Europe." There were cobblestones and picturesque staircases, and sudden unfolding views of old churches and great bridges. I am still amazed at the way that Buda seems to have complete additional dimension that Pest lacks. 

It isn't surprising that Pest lacks a certain old world feel to it. The rapid growth on this side of the river after the Great Compromise called to mind nothing short of the rapid urbanization in the United States. There is to this day a neighborhood in Pest called "Little Chicago," because it appeared so fast that way they imagined American cities did.