Street That’s a Little Bit Beatnik, a Little Bit Dior : Budapest’s most stylish shopping district compares with Venice Boardwalk for hard-edge vitality.

Six or eight years ago--several centuries, that is, before the Berlin Wall came down and Ronald McDonald set up shop on the front steps of the Kremlin--I happened to watch a TV documentary about the tentative successes of Hungary’s so-called “goulash communism,” which permitted limited free enterprise and gave Budapest, at the time, the highest standard of living of any Eastern European city (with the possible exception of Zagreb or Ljubljana, in what was formerly Yugoslavia).

One sequence compared a street scene in Moscow with one in the Hungarian capital. In Moscow, all was gray--the skies, the buildings, the nearly empty shop windows, even the complexions (and, of course, the overcoats) of the bulky, scowling men and women who trudged past the camera. In Budapest, in jarring contrast, the sun was shining, there were green trees on every corner, the shops were gay and full of goods, and the street was riotously alive with colorfully dressed, trim, good-looking young Hungarians. Though I had long been fascinated by what I’d tasted of the foods and wines of Hungary, and by what I’d seen (on film) of the Hungarian countryside, I think it was these jaunty urban images that first made me want to see Budapest itself.

The street shown in the documentary, I learned when I finally got to the city for the first time in mid-1990, was Vaci Utca.

Vaci Utca--pronounced approximately “VAHT-see OOT-sa” (it is named for the important industrial town of Vac, about 25 miles north of Budapest)--extends for about a dozen blocks, from the handsome, always-bustling Vorosmarty Square through the historic center of old “inner city” Pest. (What is now Budapest was, until 1872, the separate cities of Buda, Obuda and Pest, and the old names are still used to describe the respective sections of the city.)

For about half of its length, Vaci Utca, together with a few small cross-streets feeding into it, is paved with shiny new cobblestones and restricted to pedestrians--an innovation ordered by since-deposed Hungarian Communist leader Janos Kadar in the mid-1980s, supposedly after he had seen a similar, though much larger and richer, pedestrian shopping zone in Munich. (New boutiques, bars and such are now popping up on the non-pedestrian portion of the street as well, and there is a plan to ban cars from its entire length within a year or so.)

Long before Kadar, though, Vaci Utca was famous as an elegant and cosmopolitan shopping street. Noted Hungarian author Gyula Krudy (as quoted by John Lukacs in his splendidly evocative “Budapest 1900,” published by Grove, $10.95 paperback) describes the street, as it was in the early years of the century, thus: “famous shops . . . sold the best goods from London . . . . The merchandise from Paris arrived directly, scented like women before a grand soiree . . . . The waiter in the coffeehouse put the recent Le Figaro in your hands. The barber had learned his trade in Paris; virgins embroidered initials on linens; the spice shop had the odors of a great freighter just arrived from Bombay . . . .”

Embroidering virgins and Paris-trained barbers are in short supply on Vaci Utca today. But the street remains a colorful, busy and even still rather stylish artery--hardly another Fifth Avenue or Bond Street (as it has sometimes been called by overenthusiastic local boosters), but at least a sort of small-scale equivalent of Upper Broadway, the Venice Boardwalk or the Place St-Michel. It is partly tacky, partly bohemian, partly well-to-do--a center of activity, a promenade, a street where reality and dreams meet and chat and sometimes go off hand-in-hand.

Vaci Utca is also, though, a place where dreams and reality clash. For every well-heeled German or American tourist or new-breed Budapest rich kid who strides Vaci Utca, there are 100 or 200 just plain Hungarians trying to get along as best they can. Thus, seedy-looking black-market money-changers ply their trade a few doors down from the American Express cash machine; impoverished farm women from the countryside, dressed in traditional costume, hawk blouses, rugs and baskets just outside the Adidas and the Reebok stores; itinerant ice cream vendors and sidewalk portrait artists set up shop near the Dixie Csirke outlet ( csirke is Hungarian for chicken) and the Otard Drinkbar, where Sinead O’Connor sings on the stereo and a shot of good French cognac costs the equivalent of a day’s salary at the minimum wage.

Indeed, contrast seems to define Vaci Utca. On that first trip of mine to Budapest, I happened to witness a particularly dramatic example of cultural/sociological juxtaposition on the street: As I sauntered along, a blast of circusy music suddenly exploded into the air. Through the crowds, from the direction of Vorosmarty Square, four costumed figures on three-foot stilts suddenly appeared. One wore flowing off-white robes decorated with Cy Twombley-ish scribbles, and a white mask and burnoose; another was garbed in black and wore a death’s-head mask; the other two, a maskless couple, black man and white woman, were dressed conversely in billowy white and black. As they danced and dipped and strutted, the four handed out handbills exhorting passersby to come see their theater troupe perform that night. Following them as they moved down the street were their musicians, playing accordion, cornet, soprano saxophone and snare drum--and behind them, as if in mock-solemn processional coda to the stilt-walkers’ gaudy pleas, came the rest of the cast: a young bride with two teen-age flower girls and a figure dressed like a Chinese monk, wearing a porcelain mask.

As they passed where I was standing, I realized that another group of costumed performers was coming the other way down the street: Moving silently, at normal height, these were five or six young men and women in mime’s makeup and Chaplinesque tuxedos. They were smiling and bowing as they walked, with that maddening mimes’ presumption of the world’s collusion, and selling copies of a special bilingual edition of the Budapest financial newspaper, Tozsde Kurir or “Stock Market Courier”--in celebration of the official opening, that very day, on that very street, of the Budapest Stock Exchange, the first such institution in Hungary in 42 years.

Here, it seemed to me, was Budapest seen from two sides--old and new, raucous and mute, artistic and venal. Here were two worlds, not exactly colliding, but not exactly embracing, either.

Its role as metaphorical backdrop aside, how good is the shopping on Vaci Utca? That depends on what you’re looking for. There’s probably not much point in the American visitor patronizing the Adidas, Reebok, Christian Dior, Estee Lauder or Marks and Spencer stores. On the other hand . . . .

Just past the Dior boutique, and down a flight of stairs at No. 11b Vaci Utca, is a new, highly informal arcade of little independently-owned boutiques--about 20 of them in all--called Labirintus, worth visiting if you’re a sharp-eyed shopper. Most of the stores sell clothing, much of it Eastern European knock-offs of American casual wear, but there are a couple of small-scale antique shops with interesting items (old glassware, 1930s lamps) and it is possible to find occasional handmade jewelry or belts or blouses of some charm lurking even in the clothing stores.

Upstairs, at No. 11a, Butorszalon offers Hungarian-made Varga crystal, with prices beginning at about $15 for small hand-etched goblets, and other glassware and china. Nearby, on the corner of Vaci Utca and Regisposta Utca, just down from the New York Topless Bar and one of Budapest’s several McDonald’s (this one huge, older by several years than Moscow’s, and ensconced behind the gleaming copper window frames of one of the city’s rare Deco-style facades) is a little gourmet shop called Bonbon, selling Hungarian wines (including the famous Tokay, several examples of which may be had for $10-$15 a bottle), fruit brandies, paprika, marzipan and other products--good and unusual gifts.

The saleswomen at the state-owned Folkart Centrum, across the street from Bonbon, tend to be brusque and surly, but the selection of handcrafted textiles, ceramics and other traditional items is large and varied. Handsome Turkish-inspired area rugs, for instance, run $60-$75; decorative embroidered panels, lace-patterned red against black, may be had for $1.25 (for handkerchief-size ones) to $35; lovely, heavy embroidered linen tablecloth and napkin sets are priced between $60 and $115. There are also attractive linen blouses (just the thing for a springtime wedding), assorted pottery, even some small furniture.

Hand-painted dolls and miscellaneous folksy tchotchkes are sold in privately owned and apparently nameless shops at No. 17 (notice the building’s beautiful facade of carved wood extending up to an ornate tile top) and at No. 22, which also has a wide choice of delicately ornamented wooden eggs. Nipp Antiquitat, in a courtyard behind No. 8, specializes in embroidered clothing, including some intensely colorful antique peasant skirts that are quite remarkable, at about $120.

Just off Vaci Utca, on Pesti Barnabas Utca, is a new gallery called Grafikai Es Erem Kabinet, selling very good contemporary Hungarian lithographs, posters (from about $10) and the like. On the far side of Vaci Utca, the antiquarian bookstore whose long Hungarian name is translated into English on the window as “Second-hand Bookshop to the Owl,” sells not only books (mostly in Hungarian or German) but also fascinating antique maps.

When I visited Budapest in 1990, credit cards were something of a novelty, at least outside the major hotels and most expensive restaurants. Now bright, fresh Visa, Eurocard (MasterCard) and American Express stickers decorate windows on Vaci Utca, and elsewhere, like flowers newly bloomed. This doesn’t help most Hungarians, of course. Credit cards (Visa, specifically) became available to local citizens for the first time only in 1990--and, at that, only to the very small number of local citizens who could afford to maintain a deposit of at least $2,000 at the Hungarian Foreign Trade Bank (this in a country where the average family income in Hungary has been estimated at as little as $200 a month).

This brings up the dark side of Vaci Utca: the fact that the vast majority of Hungarians, even those with good jobs, living in decent neighborhoods in Budapest, can’t afford much of anything it has for sale. Life is hard in the city, and has gotten harder since the fall of the Communist regime. Rents and basic food prices have almost doubled in the past year. Almost two-thirds of the country’s working-age adults, in Budapest as elsewhere, are said to be holding down at least two jobs and unemployment is rampant. In this climate, the activities of the Hungarian Stock Exchange must seem as fantastical and ephemeral to most residents of the city as do the most imaginative costumed productions of any theatrical troupe.

At nighttime, when all the businesses on Vaci Utca are closed, except for the cafes and bars and the roving street-vendors (and the Russian prostitutes who have recently infiltrated Budapest’s night life), the street becomes largely the property of window shoppers, strolling up and down, gazing at the wondrous goods displayed behind thick glass, exclaiming over this treasure or that, perhaps imagining the purchase of some new running shoes or a microwave or a bottle of French perfume. It is good to remember, I think, that window shopping is pretty much what most Hungarians must do during the day when the stores are open, too.