This week's Art Nouveau Wonder leads us into the Jewish district, the disctrict with th ruin bars...Lokál does not seem amazing at first view, but it has a story full with legends and apart from having a nice beer there, you will feel the need to discover more and more...
The quarter we are in served as a red light district up till the 18th century - actually the one and only SEX SECOND HAND (!) shop can be found here in town (we will discover and write about it soon!)Music halls, inns, hotels and brothels, even wine cellars lay behind the walls of houses in and around Király street. From the 19 hundreds Jewish traders and other nationalities settled in Erzsébet Town, shaping the character of the neighbourhood. Multinational yet also distinctly Jewish, the district served the community of several tens of thousands with its tabernacles, smokehouses, kosher grocery stores, coffee houses, barber shops. The area now gives a perfect setting for ruin pubs and the thriving underground culture of Budapest.
The building housing Lokál was erected in 1845. Initially L-shaped, the structure was extended with a wing in 1863 to fit Hoffer's Smokehouse. Classicist in the beginning, the building was refurbished in 1906 in Art Nouveau stlyle. This is when the ornate plasterwork was also added. The richly decorated gateway, the wrought-iron railings of the staircase, and the 3 tracts of the street front wing unusual in similar buildings all make it a true memorial of 19th century Budapest architecture. The Art Nouveau facade further heightens the house's significance, and makes it worthy of protection.
As with many of the neighbourhood's older buildings, stories circulate about the past of Dob 18.
According to some sources, the Hungarian Royal Railways Archives, and the staff's apartments were to be found here. Others claim a brothel functioned among its walls, a hardly surprising supposition given that several dozens of such establishments dotted the nearby streets up till the 19th century.
First the ruin pub 'Mumus' (Bugbear) operated here, later Lokál took over. Even the paintings on the wall recall the turn of the century; witness the mural with Lokál's logo quoting the cover of Nyugat, a renowned literary journal of the time.
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| Lokal's logo - quoting 'Nyugat' |
Another account has it, that when the pub was being done up, walled in photographs of a Jewish family emerged. Apparently the family had been hiding from the Nazis in the cellars, and before being transported to death camps wished to preserve the photos by bricking them in.
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