This is why Hungarians hated the Chain Bridge for decades

According to pestbuda.hu, everybody knows that it was István Széchenyi who organised the building of the capital city’s first bridge, the Chain Bridge, but there’s a fact that has fallen into oblivion, a fact that prevented the bridge from becoming the symbol of the city union. It is the pontage that had to be paid in the 19th century.

The three cities, lying next to each other, Pest, Buda and Óbuda had been functioning as the capital city of the country, when they were united in 1873. But untroubled development had to face some obstacles for quite a while.

One of these was the different structure of the population and the economy: while in Pest, the dynamically developing city of trade, you could hear more and more Hungarian words since the Hungarian Reform Era, Buda, the stagnating bureau city was mostly dwelled by German speakers. Moreover, the cities were actually divided by the Danube for most of the time, because people could only cross the river on pontoon-bridges and boats. This, of course, wasn’t possible during the winter months (especially if the water didn’t freeze, so people couldn’t step on it).

The toll milestone

So the inauguration of the first permanent bridge, the Chain Bridge in 1849 was a true milestone: anybody could cross the river after that. At least those who could pay the pontage. The pedestrians wishing to cross got a special coin at one end of the bridge after paying one kreuzer, which one had to put into a coin-box at the other end. But the sum of the pontage grew with the delivered goods: if you went on foot but carried something with you, the fee was 2 kreuzers, it was 4 kreuzers if you went on a horse, and so on.

Even though pontage was a widely used type of tax throughout history, it started to become more and more unpleasant in Budapest. In the time of Széchenyi, there was a debate about whether or not nobles had to pay, but more and more people raised their voices against the matter with time. Pontage played an important role: it produced great profit for the operator of the bridge, the Chain Bridge Corporation, and for the capital city indirectly. Due to this, all of the credits paid back with great profit by 1870.

The hated contribution

However, Budapest dwellers started to think about the pontage as the symbolic obstacle in the way of the city council and development. For instance, on the 18^th of January, 1874 (when Margaret Bridge was already under construction), hundreds of civilians wrote a memorandum to the leadership about “the abolishment of the Chain Bridge toll-money”.