The bench commemorating assassinated President Paweł Adamowicz was not coincidentally placed on the northern tip of Granary Island, which is filling up with development.
During the presidency of Paweł Adamowicz, Gdańsk underwent huge spatial changes, with new investments springing up like mushrooms after the rain. One of them is the development of the northern tip of Granary Island, which is nearing completion today. It was there, on the 5th anniversary of the President's death, that a commemorative bench was unveiled. It stood near the rotary footbridge over the Motlawa River, which connects Granary Island with Dlugi Pobrzeze.
Overlooking Dlugi Pobrzeze
The bronze statue, which was financed by private investors building on Granary Island, looks toward the Crane, while the bench's backrest features a panorama of the Long Embankment. The sculpture is 160 centimeters high and two meters wide. The casting was made of chiseled brass. Previously, the sculptor spent several months making the work in clay. The entire project from commission to completion took a year.
Granary Island is the part of the city where in the 17th century there were about three hundred granaries storing thousands of tons of grain. Most of them were razed to the ground in March 1945, and the post-war landscape has long been a nuisance to residents. Until quite recently, the site was haunted by ruins and grew thickets, although the need to develop the area had been talked about in the city for years.
The breakthrough came in 2015. That's when the City signed an agreement with a private investor - a consortium of Immobel and Multibud — to develop the city land under a public-private partnership. Today, the grand project is slowly moving toward completion.
The statue of the assassinated president is located on the Motława waterfront
photo: Grzegorz Mehring / www.Gdańsk.pl
this place has changed a lot
The effects? Along with other private investments taking place in recent years, Granary Island has been filled with apartments, hotels, cafes and restaurants, streets have been rebuilt, a rotating footbridge over the Motlawa River has been built, and Long Wharf is being renovated.
President Paweł Adamovich pursued this goal in public-private partnership with great persistence. He strived to make this place in Gdańsk change. Today we are slowly completing the redevelopment of this area, and on the other side the modernization of Dlugie Pobrzeze is underway. We can already be proud of this place, and in two years we will see the proverbial icing on the cake ," says Aleksandra Dulkiewicz, mayor of Gdańsk.
The author of the monument is Andrzej Renes, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels (Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts). The sculptor is known for his monuments to Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski on Krakowskie Przedmieście, Warsaw President Stefan Starzynski, the Praga Band in Warsaw, Ignacy Jan Paderewski in New York, and Danuta Siedzikówna "Inka" in Gdańsk's Orunia district, among others.
Author of the project Andrzej Renes
photo: Grzegorz Mehring / www.Gdańsk.pl
