A city bus and a horse cab pass each other in the foreground, the cab driver in a flat cap with passengers under its folded hood, a man on a moped alongside and a woman in a boldly striped dress at the kerb beside a traffic signal. Behind them the rounded corner block of the Merchant Youths' Home rises four storeys in curved bays and banded windows, with ALBUS in large letters across its roof and microwave dishes on a mast beside them.
About this place
A rounded corner block on the boulevard at the junction with Ignjata Pavlasa, built as the home of the Novi Sad commercial youth and carrying that title cut in Cyrillic across its cornice, which is among the longest surviving public inscriptions on any facade in the city and is legible in this archive's photographs of it. Đorđe Tabaković designed it, work began on 7 May 1931 and the building was finished about a year later, paid for largely by the merchants' association; the Novi Sad merchants Nikola Tanurdžić and Miloš Raletić are the two most credited with bringing it about. Money ran short and it went up without its intended left wing. King Alexander I attended the dedication in the summer of 1934. It was among the first buildings of the new quarter laid out south of the old centre in the 1930s, twice the height of what stood there before, with an undecorated front and reinforced concrete used in part, and it set the scale for the whole boulevard. A reclining figure of Mercury, the god of commerce, stands on its roofline above the lettering, and shops ran along its ground floor under awnings. The interior was finished after the shell, and the building was formally opened on 10 June 1934. After the Second World War it was nationalised and the city pharmacy opened on the ground floor, a use the corner still has. In the 1960s a wing and a further storey were added, so a photograph showing the building at its original height is earlier than that work.
- Date
- 1970s
- Coordinates
- 45.25403, 19.84867
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 2000 × 1401 px
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