Madách Imre tér: The Avenue That Was Never Built
Why is it significant?
Stand in front of the huge archway on Madách Imre tér and look up. It is a gateway several storeys high, set in a block of tall modernist apartment houses. Behind it you expect a grand boulevard... and instead you get a short avenue that stops after a couple of hundred metres.
Key Facts
| Place | Madách Imre tér: The Avenue That Was Never Built |
|---|---|
| Address | Madách Imre tér, 1075 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.49720, 19.05690 |
| Part of Walk | Three Synagogues and a Tree of Life: Budapest's Jewish Quarter from Gozsdu to Dohány Street |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in front of the huge archway on Madách Imre tér and look up. It is a gateway several storeys high, set in a block of tall modernist apartment houses. Behind it you expect a grand boulevard... and instead you get a short avenue that stops after a couple of hundred metres. That disappointment is the whole story.
On this spot, until the 1930s, stood the Orczy House, a sprawling building that for over a century was a hub of Jewish Pest. In its courtyards and rooms there were prayer houses, shops, coffee houses and offices, and merchants arriving from the provinces did business here. In the 1930s it was demolished to make way for something modern.
The new plan was ambitious: a straight, wide avenue called Madách Imre út, running from the boulevard right through the old streets of the Jewish quarter towards the outer ring. The arch was meant to be its triumphant entrance. The first section was built in the late 1930s, with these monumental houses on either side. Then came the war, and the rest of the avenue was never built.
It is hard to stand here and not think about what that plan would have meant. Cutting an avenue through the quarter would have erased a whole web of courtyards, prayer rooms and workshops. History did the erasing differently, and far more terribly, a few years later. The old streets survived; most of their people did not.
The square is named after Imre Madách, the nineteenth-century author of The Tragedy of Man, a play in which Adam travels through all of human history and keeps losing hope... and is told at the end to strive and to trust. Fitting enough for this gateway. Walk through the arch now and follow the short avenue to its end, at Rumbach Sebestyén utca. Look out for an octagonal facade in Moorish stripes.