As the hiker makes his way up from the Jánosegy station of the Children’s Railway, he wonders who János could have been, after whom the mountain got its name. Before the 1900s, the 527-meter-high limestone mountain was called Pozsonyi-hegy. Moreover, the northern promontory of János-hegy is still called that today (supposedly because from here you can see all the way to Bratislava). According to the available sources, a statue of St. John once stood at the top of the hill, and it is also possible that the name commemorates the 14th-century rector (in essence, the chief administrative official) of Budavár, Count János Óvári.
It is a fact, however, that at the end of the 19th century there was a lookout made of wood on the mountain ridge, where Queen Elizabeth visited several times in 1882. Even then, the citizens of the capital wanted a lookout tower built of stone on top of the mountain, but they had to wait a long time for that. Twenty years later, the 31st international restaurateur congress was held in Budapest, the main organizer of which was the hotel owner, urbanist and patron Frigyes Glück, who initiated the construction of a new lookout point on the mountain through public donations. HUF 51,000 was collected from donations.
The capital assembly entrusted engineer Pál Klunzinger with the design, and then Frigyes Schulek, head of the department of the University, molded the drawings into their final form, in neo-Romanesque style. Construction began in 1908 from the limestone of the plateau next to the mountain. The foundation of the 23.5-meter-high stone tower with four terraces and a round floor plan is one of the first reinforced concrete structures in the country. The building was inaugurated on September 8, 1910, and was one of the largest such buildings in Europe at the time. Alajos Strobl’s statue of Erzsébet stands in the lobby, the art nouveau mosaics depicting the queen are the works of Dezső Kölber and Viktor Tardos Krenner, the mosaic decorations were made by Miksa Róth.
The lookout was not only for hikers, it also served as a weather station for a while. In 1926, it received permanent decorative lighting, which was the first in the country. Between the two world wars, hundreds of thousands of hikers visited the Erzsébet Lookout, but from 1948 the building no longer fits into the central ideology. In 1950, a large red star was placed on the top of the observatory, which seriously damaged the structure of the structure, and therefore the observatory was closed. It had to wait decades for its renovation, the Hegyvidéki Self-Government handed over the beautified building in 2005.