Danube Promenade

Grand hotels rose on filled riverbank, then burned in siege

You're standing beside the Danube Promenade, known to locals as Dunakorzó, a pedestrian boardwalk running along the Danube in Budapest's Inner City. It stretches from the Chain Bridge down to the Erzsébet Bridge, with Vigadó tér marking its middle.

The promenade grew up in front of a row of grand 19th-century hotels: the Hungária, the Bristol, the Carlton, and the Ritz. Before that, the riverbank here was just a shallow slope down to the water. The Danube Steamship Company began filling it in during the 1850s, building a stone wall to protect its own docked boats. Pest's city engineers kept extending that stone wall through the 1860s and 1870s, turning mudflats into a proper embankment and clearing the way for the esplanade people strolled on through the Austro-Hungarian era.

Nine riverside cafés once lined this stretch, most with open terraces facing the water. The promenade quickly became one of Budapest's favorite public spaces, drawing locals and tourists who came just to look across at Buda Castle and Gellért Hill.

The Danube Promenade's grand hotel era ended in 1945. Allied and Soviet shelling during the siege of Budapest flattened nearly every hotel on the row. Only the Bristol survived the war intact, and even that building came down in 1969.

The ruin was worse than shelling alone. During the siege, the Dunapalota hotel became a makeshift hospital, with anti-aircraft guns bolted to its own roof. The Ritz took heavy bomb damage along with the rest of the row. By the time the fighting stopped, the whole promenade lay buried in debris.

On the riverbank nearby, Arrow Cross militiamen marched Jewish men, women and children to the water's edge that winter and shot them into the Danube, letting the current carry the bodies away so the killers would not need to bury them.

Cleanup took decades, not months. In its place, and on the lots where the Hungária and Carlton once stood, went up the Duna InterContinental, a glass tower with none of the old hotels' ornament. The Ritz was gone too, replaced in 1981 by the Forum Hotel. At Eötvös tér, where insurance offices and the Lloyd palace had stood before the war, a Hyatt opened in 1982.

In 1983, the city paved the whole stretch as a pedestrian street, the form it still holds. The modern hotels kept trading names: the old InterContinental became the Marriott, the Forum became the InterContinental again. Only one building on the promenade reaches back before the war. The Thonet-ház, built in 1871 for the furniture maker Michael Thonet, still stands, and a restaurant called Dunacorso has operated from inside it since the same year, run by the Schuch family since 1971.

At Vigadó tér, the Vigadó of Pest concert hall marks the promenade's midpoint. Its predecessor, the Redoute, burned down in 1849 when General Hentzi's artillery bombarded it from Buda Castle during the War of Independence. The Romantic-style hall built to replace it opened in 1865, hosting Liszt and later Mahler, Wagner and Brahms. It too took heavy bomb damage in World War II and stood as a shell for over two decades. Reconstruction did not finish until 1980.

A small bronze girl sits on the railing near Vigadó tér, the Little Princess, sculpted by László Marton (sculptor) after his own daughter's games of dress-up. The original miniature dates to 1972; this larger copy has perched on the promenade since 1989 and has become one of the most photographed spots on the river.

About 300 meters south, past the Vigadó, sixty pairs of cast-iron shoes sit fixed to the stone bank. Shoes on the Danube Bank, by sculptor Gyula Pauer and filmmaker Can Togay, was unveiled on April 16, 2005. It marks the stretch of riverbank where militiamen forced victims to remove their shoes before the shooting.

North of Vigadó tér, beneath Margaret Bridge, a sightseeing boat called the Hableány, meaning 'mermaid' in Hungarian, collided with the larger cruise ship Viking Sigyn on 29 May 2019, during a rainstorm. The Hableány was carrying 35 people, mostly South Korean tourists, and capsized and sank within seconds. Twenty-seven people died and one remains missing.

Today the promenade carries café tables, buskers and tour groups rather than the mirrored windows of vanished grand hotels. The view across to Buda Castle and Gellért Hill hasn't changed, even if almost nothing else along this bank has.