A tinted view of Ferenc József tér with the Grand Hotel Mayer and its neighboring shops, their ground floor signs reading Récsei Gusztáv and a Bierhalle. Rows of canvas market stalls fill the square in front, and a horse and rider cross the cobblestones in the foreground while a laden cart waits at the far left. The caption reads only Ujvidék, Ferencz József-tér, with no German or Serbian text.
About this place
A hotel on the north-east side of the main square, next door to the Novi Sad Savings Bank. The building was raised in 1892 in an eclectic manner with neo-Renaissance detail, two storeys under a cupola, its central bay flanked by paired half-columns and its facade carrying festoons of branches and fruit, satyr heads and palmettes over the first-floor windows and heads of women set in shells over the second. It stands on a site that had held a coffee house since the middle of the eighteenth century and then the Zeleni venac hotel. Emerich Mayer was among its owners, and Lazar Dunđerski bought it in 1916. It became the Sloboda hotel in 1947 and the Army Hall in 1953, and the Serbian National Theatre played in the Sloboda's hall. The Great National Assembly of Vojvodina met in the building in 1918. It is protected as a cultural monument of great significance.
Postcards sold the hotel and the savings bank together under a double caption, Takarekpenztar es Grand Hotel and Sparkasse und Grand Hotel, so the two buildings share a great many frames. A beer hall traded on the ground floor, signed in three languages as Sorcsarnok, Pivara and Bierhalle.
On the card
Újvidék; Ferenc József tér
- Date
- 1896–1918
- Coordinates
- 45.25534, 19.84465
- Source
- Zempléni Múzeum, Szerencs - képeslapok
- Credit
- Zempléni Múzeum, Szerencs
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 2569 × 1685 px
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