Looking at the Chinese, Turkish and American fast-food restaurants that line the streets of Budapest today, it is difficult to imagine that a restaurateur and later hotel owner could become a city developer. But Glück was just such a man. He thought it an elemental principle of business that the Hungarian capital should grow richer and more beautiful. With his inheritance of the hotel at the corner of Rákóczi Street and Múzeum Avenue, Glück found himself at the centre of Budapest's bourgeois culture - next to the National Theatre, in the vicinity of Parliament - at its height around the turn of the century.
An early adopter of new technologies, Glück's hotel was the first to be equipped with electric lighting, central heating and a lift. A gas stove presented at the 1885 National Exhibition catering pavilion, which Glück organised, created a sensation. Glück strove for professional as well as technical excellence, contributing to a gastronomical lexicon and working to establish norms for the training of waiters. He was also a philanthropist, and the city's Stefánia Hospital and the National Children's Hospital benefited from his generosity.
As much a lover of nature as café culture, Glück spent much time in the Buda hills. The Erzsébet Tower on János Hill, a Budapest landmark, as well as the Árpád Lookout on Gugger Hill were both Glück's initiatives.
Glück left his mark in other parts of the city too: Budapest's Rákóczi Street is so named because Glück pressed for the ashes of Ferenc Rákóczi, the leader of the Hungarian uprising against the Hapsburgs in 1703-1711, to be paraded down the broad street that dissects the Pest side of the city after their return to Hungary rather than along the körút, which encompasses inner Pest. The street, of course, passed in front of the Pannonia Hotel. A plaque commemorating the event can still be seen today on the façade of the hotel.
The exhibition at the Museum of Trade and Tourism shows just a few parts of Glück's life work, but the photographs, menus, invitations and writings draw one into a time in the past when Budapest was indeed the Paris of the East.
Author: Eszter Götz
