1 Budapest's claim to be the fastest growing city in the immediate years around the turn of the twentieth century is reiterated in contemporary accounts in the foreign press. It is also largely supported through official statistics in Hall, Thomas, Planning Europe's Capital Cities: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Urban Development (London, 1997), 264.Google Scholar Between 1800 and 1900, Budapest saw a staggering 1,255 percent increase in its population, out-pacing Berlin, Brussels, Athens, Helsinki, and Vienna, among others. Only Christiania (modern-day Oslo) saw a greater increase in the same period. Hall points out the difficulty of capturing these statistics, since the expanding official boundaries of some cities affected population figures. Nevertheless, Budapest's claim to be outpacing other large European cities of the same period, is substantiated by Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske, eds., Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870–1930 (New York, 1994), 2–4 , 30–36; and Karoly Voros, “Birth of Budapest: Building a Metropolis, 1873–1918,” in Gero, Andras and Poor, Janos, eds., Budapest: A History from Its Beginnings to 1998, trans. JuditZinner (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 103.Google Scholar

2 Gero, Andras, Modern Hungarian Society in the Making: The Unfinished Experience,trans. James Patterson and Eniko Koncz (Budapest, 1995), 204.Google Scholar The Hungarian government called upon the Academy of Sciences in 1882 to agree upon a period of time in which the conquest likely occurred. A twelve-year window between 888 and 900 AD was established, and a government statute set the millennium for 1896.

3 Ibid.

4 Hungary's Millennial Exhibition is deliberately referred to throughout this article as an exhibition and not a world's fair in order to examine the complexity of perception around the urban event as it unfolded in Budapest. In the international press, the exhibition was described interchangeably as all of these (a national exhibition, a millennial exhibition, and a world's fair) and understood by the local and international public of the time as something more than a localized exhibition. But I have found conflicting accounts concerning whether the official sanctioning body of world's fairs, the Bureau International des Expositions (or BIE), has recognized the Budapest exhibition of 1896 as a registered “Universal Exhibition.” Much of this confusion relates to Hungary's status as a dual partner in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a point I will explore. Significantly, the BIE was established by an international diplomatic convention, signed in Paris in 1928, with the stated function of establishing rules and defining the characteristics of world's fairs and with the intent to control the frequency and quality of exhibitions. Since Budapest's 1896 exhibition occurred before clear categorizations were imposed, the status of the event remains unclear.

5 Blau, Eve, “The City as Protagonist: Architecture and the Cultures of Central Europe”, in Blau, Eve and Platzer, Monika, eds., Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe, 1890–1937 (New York, 1999), 14.Google Scholar

6 For a discussion on Magyarization in Austria-Hungary through the nineteenth century, see Nemes, Robert, The Once and Future Budapest (DeKalb, 2005).Google Scholar This study provides a recent contribution to the growing understanding of how Budapest was consciously modeled as a Hungarian capital, despite its heterogeneous population. Notably, as Nemes asserts at one point in his study, “In nineteenth century Hungary and in Habsburg Central Europe more generally, individuals' national affiliations were not written in stone. If they wanted, men and women could show their national loyalties by joining a club, adopting a new surname, buying seats at a theatre, or choosing a school for their children. For some families, giving preference to the Hungarian language showed at least tacit approval for the nationalist project. Alternatively, town dwellers could attempt to ignore the national question altogether, change their minds, or profess loyalty to the Emperor-King, international socialism, or the Catholic Church. In this sense, historians are correct to describe the process by which the population of Budapest became ‘Hungarian’ as spontaneous and unplanned” (179, emphasis added).

7 This was also reflected in foreign press accounts that praised Budapest officials for putting on a fair up to western standards. See, for example, “Hungary's Great Celebration,” New York Times, 9 June 1896.

8 In both Hungarian and English tourist guidebooks to Budapest for 1896, the map shown of the exhibition appeared largely unchanged, suggesting a continuity and control over how the exhibition was officially pictured and charted out for visitors.

9 Together with the prominent “nationality street” where Croatian, Serbian, Romanian, and other minority groups' art and culture were displayed, the fairground included a small-scale replica of Old Buda Castle as it was imagined under Turkish occupation between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (complete with a large mosque). The inclusion of other national cultures in the Austro-Hungarian empire at the exhibition simultaneously leant an air of internationalism and colonialism often present at world's fairs.

10 See, for example, die following guides published in English: Kahn, Joseph and Klein, F. A., Practical English Guide to the City of Budapest (Budapest, 1896);Google Scholar Hungary, Budapest with Fourteen Maps and Plans: Singer and Wolfner's Handbooks for Travellers (Budapest, 1896); Celled, Morice, The Millennial Realm of Hungary: Its Past and Present (Budapest, 1896).Google Scholar

11 Lenkei, Henrik, A Mulato Budapest (Budapest, 1896).Google Scholar

12 Certain monuments, artworks, and buildings were more careful to include direct reference to the dual monarchy. For example, the Millennial Monument under construction during the exhibition, reserved the last five spaces for statues on the left of the colonnade for members of the ruling Habsburgs (the statues on the right were designated heroes of Hungarian history), while the newly constructed Palace of Ait was modeled on the Viennese-inspired neoclassical museum design.

13 For broader studies, see Greenhalgh, Paul, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester, Eng., 1988);Google Scholar Findling, John E. and Pelle, Kimberly D., Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988 (New York, 1990);Google Scholar Rydell, Robert W., World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago, 1993);Google Scholar Rydell, Robert W., Gwinn, Nancy E., and Gilbert, James Burkhart, Fair Representations: World'sFairs and the Modern World (Amsterdam, 1994);Google Scholar Harvey, Penelope, Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State and the Universal Exhibition (London, 1996);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Mattie, Erik, World'sFairs (New York, 1998);Google Scholar Rydell, Robert W., Findling, John E., and Pelle, Kimberly D., Fair America: World's Fairs in the United States (Washington, D.C., 2000).Google Scholar

14 first encountered this idea in Freifeld, Alice, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848–1914 (Washington, D.C., 2000), 268–78.Google Scholar Freifeld discusses, among other valuable details, the Budapest public's interest in the attractions of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.

15 Ibid., 270. This awareness of the 1893 exhibition in Chicago is not surprising since details about the fair (from Hungarian visitors and correspondents) spread through local newspaper accounts of the event through the 1890s.

16 Hall, Planning Europe's Capital Cities, 335–36. Hall explains that whereas in Vienna the development process was greatly facilitated by the fact that most of the land used to build up the Ringstrasse district was in public ownership and unbuilt (over 600 plots were sold to private individuals and companies once the old city walls were torn down in 1857, and the revenue from these sales was enough to cover the cost of the public buildings), the situation in Budapest required a large number of existing areas to be demolished and populations to be uprooted, not unlike the situation in Paris under Haussmannization. This caused far more tension in the planning enterprise and meant that far more interests had to be taken into account in the process of implementing a new urban plan.

17 For examples from the foreign press about Budapest's rapid growth, see Shaw, Albert, “Budapest, The Rise of a New Metropolis,” Century 44, no. 2 (1892);Google Scholar “Hungary, Its Rapid Progress,” New York Times, 21 June 1896; Richard Harding Davis, “Yankee City of the Old World,” Washington Post, 28 February 1987.

18 The camera, cinematograph, and panorama are examples of these new technologies and are discussed in detail in Dorothy Barenscott, “Troubling Modernity: Spatial Politics, Technologies of Seeing, and the Crisis of the City and the World's Exhibition in Fin de Siecle Budapest” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2007).

19 This is the argument at the core of Nemes's recent book on Budapest: Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest.

20 Davis, “Yankee City of the Old World.”

21 By the turn of the nineteenth century, Budapest was the eighdi largest city in Europe following London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Hamburg. Voros, “Birth of Budapest,” 104.

22 The first electric street cars appeared in Budapest in 1887 and by 1900 all horse-drawn carriages had been replaced by electric trolleys (which were already running before and during the Millennial Exhibition).

23 See Aládar, Edvi Illés, Budapest Muszaki Útmutatója (Budapest, 1896).Google Scholar Significantly this publication was reissued in 1996 in its original form to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Millennial Exhibition.

24 Sisa, József, “Budapest,” Centropa: A Journal ofCentral European Architecture 1, no. 1 (2001): 17.Google Scholar Hall also emphasizes this point in his discussion of Budapest's urban development. Hall, Planning Europe's Capital Cities, 252.

25 The influence of Paris's city plan is clearly visible in Budapest. As Hall argues, Budapest and Rome are the two European cities most influenced by the radial road and inner boulevarding scheme of Paris. This approach was both a political choice in the case of Budapest, since it differed dramatically from Vienna's city plan, and also likely a result of city planners' traveling to the Paris exhibition of 1867 where the city was on display for the world to see. Hall, Planning Europe's Capital Cities, 347–49.

26 One of the distinctive features of the park, as sociologist Gabor Gyani points out in his reading of the space, was how its commission and planning dovetailed with Andrassy Avenue's construction to generate a more cohesive urban character for the central, suburban, and industrial sectors of the city and their publics. As Gyani recalls, German architect Christian Heinrich Nebbien had planned the park after what has been described as the first competition in the history of landscape architecture in 1813. And in an effort to disassociate himself from prevailing trends in gardening that privileged what Nebbien termed the “contemplative and edifying recreation of the individual,” he envisioned a garden that he claimed would be “the immediate possession and creation of the people” and “the purest expression of the great virtues of a people and the product of the spirit, the taste, the patriotism and the culture of a noble nation.” One aspect of Nebbien's plan was to create large monuments to the major historical figures of Hungary's history. These developments, stalled for nearly seven decades, provided a blueprint and location for Hungary's first national exhibition in 1885, and the eventual Millennial Exhibition of 1896. Gabor Gyani, “Uses and Misuses of Public Space in Budapest: 1873–1914,” in Bender and Schorske, eds., Budapest and New York, 90.

27 The most comprehensive and detailed account of Budapest's post–1867 development (including Andrássy Avenue as a core focus) continues to be an early 1930 study published through Budapest's Metropolitan Board of Public Works. See Siklóssy, László, Hogvan epult Budapest? 1870–1930 (Budapest, 1931).Google Scholar

28 Pest's “beautifying committee,” established in 1808, was originally charged with embellishing the city through architectural upgrades to the urban environment and had a direct influence on the final plan for Andrassy Avenue. Hall, Planning Europe's Capital Cities, 246. For example, in order to maintain the elegance of Budapest's boulevards, the board denied applications by horse tram companies to build trams on Andrassy Avenue. Siklossy, Hogvan epull Budapest? 167; Blau and Platzer, eds., Shaping the Great City, 108.

29 Moravanszky, Akos, Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 1867–1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 50.Google Scholar

30 Charles Maier, “City, Empire, and the Imperial Aftermath: Contending Contexts for the Urban Vision,” in Blau and Platzer, eds., Shaping the Great City, 25.

31 Moravanszky, Competing Visions, 46. Hall also makes a similar observation through his discussion of the problematic traffic patterns created in Budapest as a result of Andrassy Avenue's apparent disconnect with die smaller boulevard closest to the city core. See Hall, Planning Europe's Capital Cities, 252.

32 For an account of the period referring to this reputation, see “Technical Education,” Catholic World 28, no. 166 (1879) where the author refers to Budapest's main technical college as “turning out some of die best mechanics in Europe” (521), recommending that Hungary's model for technical education be adopted in the United States. For a history of technical education in Hungary, see Andrea Karpati and Emil Gaul, “Art and Technology in Hungarian Education: Conflicts and Compromises,” Leonardo 23, no. 2 /3 (1990): 189–96.

33 All cited statistics on Budapest's population distribution in the fin-de-siecle period can be found in Bender and Schorske, eds., Budapest and New York, 2–4 , 30–36; and Moritz Csaky, “Multicultural Communities: Tensions and Qualities, the Example of Central Europe,” in Blau and Platzer, eds., Shaping the Great City, 45.

34 Ibid. This is a generally agreed upon estimate in the literature concerning Budapest's Jewish community that ranges between 20–25 percent. Still, the Jewish population of Budapest in the 1890s is at times difficult to pinpoint exactly because of the unknown number of Jews (likely assimilated through the process of Magyarization) who would not be identified as Jewish in the official statistics of the day.

35 The mix of architectural styles is a key characteristic of Budapest's urban development and is discussed variously by Hanak, Peter, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, 1998), 38–43;Google Scholar Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest, 160–65; and Voros, “Birth of Budapest,” 127.

36 Voros, “Birth of Budapest,” 127.

37 The most comprehensive study of the Parliament building exists as an edited collection that includes extensive drawings, illustrations, and accompanying statistics (also partially translated into English): Eszter, Gabor, ed., Az Orszdg Hdza. House of the Nation: Parliament Plans for BudaPest 1784–1884 (Budapest, 2000).Google Scholar The building is also discussed in a separate chapter in a recent book on the chief architect of the Hungarian Parliament building, Imre Steindl. Sisa, Jozsef, Imre Steindl (Budapest, 2005).Google Scholar

38 The updates to the Habsburg Royal Castle included extending and giving a more “splendid appearance” to the section facing the Danube River—the part of the castle that was ironically enough the back of the original structure. Hall, Planning Europe's Capital Cities, 253.

39 See Gabor Eszter, “The Competition to Plan a Permanent Parliament Building, 1883,” in Eszter, ed., Az Orszdg Hdza.

40 Ibid., 357.

41 Ibid., 360.

42 Numerous historians have described nineteenth-century Hungarian politicians such as Istvan Szechenyi and Gyula Andrassy as “Anglophiles” who wanted their preferred model of a parliamentary democracy, Britain, to be the model for Budapest. In their eyes, the neo-gothic signaled a particular vocabulary of liberalism that many Hungarians were keen to endorse. See, for example, the discussion in Jozsef Sisa, “Neo-Gothic Architecture and Restoration of Historic Buildings in Central Europe: Friedrich Schmidt and His School,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 2 (2002): 179; Blau and Platzer, eds., Shaping the Great City, 108.

43 Eszter, “The Competition to Plan a Permanent Parliament Building, 1883,” 362–63.

44 Ibid., 362.

45 For a detailed discussion, see Jozsef Sisa, “From the Competition Design to the Definitive Design,” in Eszter, ed., Az OrszdgHdza.

46 Almost every major foreign press report written in anticipation of the 1896 exhibition mentioned (and often pictured) the Parliament building.

47 These statistics and technological advancements are partly discussed in Sisa, “From the Competition Design to the Definitive Design,” and were also relayed to me by officials at the Hungarian Parliament building during two separate tours I took of the structure in Budapest in 2002 and 2005.

48 A number of debates in the Hungarian parliamentat the time centered on the question of building such a lavish and costly structure outside the parameters of real statehood. For a discussion, see Sisa, “From the Competition Design to the Definitive Design,” 399.

49 Berend, Ivan T., “From the Millennium to the Republic of Councils”, in Eri, Gyongyi and Jobbagyi, Zsuzsa, eds., A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary, 1896–1818 (London, 1990), 9.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 9–11.

51 This was incidentally a stated goal of the 1848 Hungarian revolutionaries.

52 Berend, “From the Millennium to the Republic of Councils,” 9–11.

53 Many primary and secondary sources discuss the technical details of the subway. In addition to material gathered at exhibits in Budapest's Millennial Underground Museum (strategically located at one of the underground stations of the original 1896 subway line), 1 also took statistics from the section devoted to the building of the subway in Aladar, Budapest Muszaki Ulmutatoja, 404–16, and from a period account (with reprinted photographs) detailed in Vasdrnapi Ujsdg4S, no. 17 (1896).

54 Engineers from New York and Boston, for example, visited Budapest around the time of the 1896 fair and made plans to implement a similar subway system in their own cities. See Crocker, George C., “The Passenger Traffic of Boston and the Subway,” New England Magazine 14, no. 5 (1899);Google Scholar and American Institute of Electiical Engineers, The New York Electrical Handbook; Being a Guide for Visitors from Abroad Attending the International Electrical Congress, St. Louis, Mo., September, J 904 (New York, 1904).

55 A prominent Budapest businessman in the 1890s,Wunsch was also an innovative engineer working in reinforced concrete design.

56 Hall emphasizes the river as a denning feature of fin-de-siecle Budapest. Hall, Planning Europe's Capital Cities, 253. The importance of Budapest as the largest port on the nearly 2,000-mile stretch of the Danube by the 1890s is also discussed in detail by Lukacs, John, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (New York, 1988), 58.Google Scholar Importantly, the increase in freight traffic to and from the Balkans was due in part to the widening of the Iron Gate narrows on the lower Danube in 1896, the same year as the exhibition.

57 Maier, “City, Empire, and the Imperial Aftermath,” 30. “The Habsburg project and the architecture that might legitimate it could never renounce the vernacular, or what was most often the case, the pseudovernacular. The city, moreover, had a particular role in Habsburg Central Europe. For it represented the site where the imperial met the local, and the architect or urban designer had to do justice simultaneously to both sources of inspiration.”

58 During the late nineteenth century, the subway was known by its official name but was most often referred to in the Budapest press as the Millennial Underground Railway, and in the international press as simply the Budapest subway/metro/underground system. In other words, the attachment of the emperor's name to the project appeared to be something of a formality.

59 Maier raises this idea in connection to Hungarian architects. In one example, Maier discusses how Viennese architect Otto Wagner told Hungarian architects in a 1915 meeting that a national style need not exist since “the artistic expression of architectural works must in every center of culture be similar.” While Wagner's intention may have been to encourage a new modernist approach, many of the architects in attendance would have understood this statement as attempting to limit nativist inspiration and exert a kind of imperial control. Maier, “City, Empire, and the Imperial Aftermath,” 29.

60 For an overview of poststructural debates and developments in discourses concerning the “ordered” and “disordered” city of the nineteenth century, see Silverman, Max, Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought (New York, 1999), 66–95.Google Scholar As Silverman writes, “Concepts of order bred new concepts of disorder—those troubling bits of waste (dangerous classes, women, foreigners and so on) which either had to be cleansed and brought into the realm of light (through the process of assimilation), or disciplined and put under surveillance to monitor their behaviour, or simply dispersed with” (67).

61 This topic is taken up at length in my broader research and centers on distinguishing the important differences between the artistic and architectural avant-garde groups of Vienna and Budapest in the decades following the 1896 Millennial Exhibition: their separate emergence, their contrasting theoretical positions on modernism, and their differing views of the role of the artist in society.

62 Perhaps not surprisingly, it is within the context of the perceived success of the 1896 fair and Budapest's moment of glory on the international stage that the Millennial Exhibition—with all of its attendant conflicts and discourses linked to the fin-de-siecle period—has become one of the most celebrated of past events in modern Hungary today. In fact, most of the individual architectural projects discussed in this article have become the focus of recent and intensive restoration efforts in a newly transforming postcommunist Hungary. For example, in terms of architectural projects and urban planning, among the first moves of the Third Hungarian Republic declared on 23 October 1989, was to restore the original nineteendi-century names to the majority of Budapest's city streets. At the same time, massive efforts to clean, beautify, and revive the city's many fin-de-siecle buildings (including most of Budapest's best-known historical cafes, luxury hotels, and theaters, together with intensified maintenance of the nation's Parliament building), was topped off by the restoration of the city's original underground subway line running underneath Andrassy Avenue to recall the appearance of benches, wooden floors, and ceramic tiling used at die time of the Millennial Exhibition in 1896.