Łódź

• 1.1m
• 123 000
• 750 €
• 1820 h
• Łódź Władysław Reymont Airport / 6 km

Księży Młyn, Łódź

Łódź, pronounced ‘wooch’, as in ‘Would you’, used to be the fastest growing city in Poland. There is no equivalent for the word ‘boomtown’ in Polish, but if there were, it would be spelled Łódź. Over the course of the nineteenth century a bucolic village of 767 inhabitants (in 1806) turned into a textile industry powerhouse of 340,000, dubbed the ‘Manchester of Poland’.

Cotton from plantations in Central Asia would arrive here and return east with affordable textiles for the hungry Russian market. Around the same time when Charles Darwin completed his Origins of the Species, his theory of survival of the fittest was already a reality in Łódź. The experiment resulted in thousands of cash-hungry Poles, Jews, Russians and Germans flocking here to play out their rags-to-riches scenario. Most of them ended up on the bottom of the food chain, but some were able to amass fortunes overnight.

The layout of the new city, located south of the old village along the high street – Piotrkowska – resembled American cities with its seemingly endless grid-like plans. The frenetic atmosphere of finde-siecle Łódź also resembled gold rush America. Perhaps this is why Andrzej Wajda’s film The Promised Land, depicting the rise of a Łódź industrialist, was so well received in America and garnered an Oscar nomination in 1976.

The old Poznański factory, immortalised by the director Andrzej Wajda in his film The Promised Land, has been converted into a luxury hotel.

When Wajda, a graduate of Łódź’s famous film school (along with the likes of Polanski and Kieślowski) set out to shoot The Promised Land, he did not have to spend much on sets. The locations – from factories to restaurants, from industrialists’ mansions to slums – were still there, intact, perhaps a little worn. In the seventies the city centre was still sandwiched between two huge, redbrick textile factories, formerly owned by two rival families that virtually ran the city at the turn of the century. The Poznański of Jewish origin, had the one in the north, and the German Scheibler family owned the other one. Both of them are a different sight now. The switch from socialism to capitalism hit Łódź hard. The industry that had first breathed life into Łódź, all but diappeared after 1989. As a result, the population shrank by some 100,000 over the course of one decade. The recovery has been long but the patient is getting better and better with each year. The unemployment rate dropped from 20 to around 6 percent from 2004 to 2008, and the city will soon officially become one of the most important transit hubs in this part of the continent – the A2, connecting Warsaw with western Europe, and the A1, linking the Baltic seaports with the south.

Piotrkowska Street is still the city’s spine, dotted with cafes, restaurants, clubs, cinemas and galleries. On the northern end, the Poznański textile factory is now a fun factory, a telling sign of a transition from an industrial to a service based economy. Alongside a huge shopping centre, there is a luxury hotel with a swimming pool suspended above the city, a cinema, dozens of restaurants, and ms2 – the new space of Łódź’s renowned Art Museum (Muzeum Sztuki). Somewhat dwarfed by all of this is Poznański’s mansion, which is now a museum and is well worth a visit as a fascinating testament of the local industrialist’s opulent, nouveau riche tastes. On the southern side of the centre, the Scheibler factory along with a cluster of other industrial buildings and working class settlements is a picturesque blend of the old, the new, the renovated and the forgotten. The main part of the Scheibler factory has been converted into loft apartments, while another factory further down Tymienieckiego street is home to Łódź Art Centre, an independent institution responsible for some interesting festivals, amongst them Łódź Design, which has quickly become the most respected design event in the country.

Culture is one of the city’s main driving forces, as evidenced by the recent success of Łódź’s animation studios, the renaissance of Muzeum Sztuki or the burst of activity of local NGOs, thriving on the abundance of empty post-industrial spaces.

Jarosław Suchan

Director of the Museum of Art in Łodź

Łodź is an unusual patchwork comprising completely disparate elements – and that’s what makes it so unique. The city is atypical, turn almost any corner and there will be a surprise in store – whether for your eyes or senses. In my opinion, the greatest attraction of Łódź is the very fact that it shatters our expectations and imagination adopted on earlier trips to other, seemingly similar, cities.

Let us go on an imaginary walk. First, see Księży Młyn (from the Łódź Fabryczna railway station towards Plac Zwycięstwa) and the remnants of one of the world’s largest nineteenth century industrial complexes. In fact, it’s a city within a city – with factories, palaces, workers’ houses, parks, schools, hospitals and even a fire station. Most of the buildings were in ruins; the original architectural design was somehow distorted by the later, not so successful architectural execution. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is unusual – impressive factory halls (some of which were recently converted into fashionable lofts), Grohman’s villa, with the interior possibly designed by Otto Wagner himself, a fantastic secessionist electric power station building etc. When you wander around the district you can’t help feeling that you are discovering a kind of forgotten world and it doesn’t matter if thousands of globetrotters have discovered it before us.

After Księży Młyn, I would recommend moving on to Ruda Pabianicka, the wooded hills in the southern part of the city stretching across to the Ner river, with its picturesque little lakes. Walking along the leafy alleys you can unexpectedly come across the dilapidated remnants of fantastic villas from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a time when it was the favourite spot for the Łódź bourgeoisie. One wooden villa that used to belong to a Jewish industrialist, Szyja Światłowski, is particularly impressive. The American film director Robby Henson chose it for the setting of his horror film House.

The old cemetery is the next must-see. Or in fact three cemeteries located next to one another: Catholic, Protestant and Russian Orthodox. Their neighbourhood is testimony to the multicultural history of the city. Amongst trees, bushes and an unkempt lawn lie the tombstones of eminent Łódź industrialists. These structures, the size and splendour of which befit palaces and castles, tell us a lot about the prosperity of the Łódź of yesteryear: the Łodź that has disappeared forever. Of course, there is also Piotrkowska street – the city’s main drag, the monumental palaces of Izaak and Karol Poznański, Łagiewnicki Forest, the biggest urban forest in Europe, the modernist Montwiłła-Mireckiego district, the Jewish cemetery with the tombstones of the greatest figures in the history of Łódź. On top of all that, the courtyards, deserted little factories, forgotten villas and palaces, parks and squares; an unbelievable maze which is best explored without recourse to guidebooks so that you allow yourself to be surprised.

Pola Stępień

Interior architect and fashion designer, founder of the wunderteam.pl group

Museum of Art, Łódź