The thing about the most beautiful street in Lodz that doesn't exist
Today, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to surprise you with a curiosity bordering on „Paranormal tourism experience”, as I come straight from the year 2044 to tell you about the coolest street in Lodz, which I had a chance to wander around. This street already stood out in its historical layout compared to other streets in the center of Lodz, but it only regained its true splendor, for good measure, a century after the war (heck, I totally don't know why I mention the war, since this one never touched it. I guess in this country it's already such an unconditional reflex). Anyway, in two decades it is a place concentrating a good part of the colorful and sumptuous life of downtown, a popular meeting place for young people and the main shopping and service street of this city, and even a place to relax and unwind. Along its frontage stretch stately, renovated townhouses, interspersed with many of Lodz's iconic new architectural developments. Standing here, for example, is the famous „Printed Tenement House” from the second half of the 1930s at the intersection with Zamenhofa Street, or many other examples of new architecture interestingly blending with the historic surroundings. Although it would be hard to explain without showing a photo. Anyway, this street is not only buildings and stores. It's mostly greenery and public space. What sets it apart from many other streets in Lodz is that it is a wide green avenue, which, by withdrawing supralocal traffic from it and leaving it mainly to public transportation, is a sanctuary of calm in the crowded city of „Polish Success,” as Lodz is colloquially referred to in Europe 2044. We are talking, by the way, not only about this one street. The entire neighborhood is attractive and full of interesting places, such as the rather famous Piotrkowska Street nearby.
-Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to „Zachkoś”.
- Er, where?
Oops. I think, unfortunately, the clock in my time machine has reset, so there will be nothing from the photos of this trip. But nothing lost, because after all, we can look at what it looks like today.
Lodz, Kosciuszko Avenue and Zachodnia Street
Photo: Pawel Mrozek
Well, against the backdrop of what this space looks like in 2023, what I am saying may seem as silly as it seemed ludicrous to us ten years ago that we would have a global pandemic and the biggest war since the IIWW. And for all that, with an enthusiasm worthy of wild cave people, we'll be pounding stone against stone to wring out sparks of artificial intelligence, because we're curious to see what happens. By the way, I'm sure that the first few successful attempts by primitive humans to start a fire ended in a bushfire, unfortunately leaving no witnesses to this momentous event in human history.
Lodz, Kosciuszko Avenue and Zachodnia Street
Photo: Pawel Mrozek
But let's go beck down to the terribly sad surface of the earth, because let's not forget that we are still in Lodz. The first thing that most caught my attention one day when I visited this city was that it is a city of two great streets. Streets on which this city has grown, although to the people of Lodz, to whom all this space has become tarnished and trivialized to the core, what I am talking about may not seem so obvious at all. Nevertheless, one could say that these streets are like two sisters. The older one—Piotrkowska—beautiful, slim, well-groomed, decorated. Everyone admires her, she is the apple of her daddy's eye. She doesn't have to do anything, she gets her pocket money, which allows her to entertain at the salons, and gallant businessmen sigh at her charms. Right next door, on the other hand, her sister—poor Kosciuszko and Western Avenue—leads a miserable fate. All shabby, dirty, crippled, dressed in rags sewn together from nothing, sickly and disinherited. Every day she wears sacks on her back in the factories at the old man's house so as not to starve to death. She is despised by all, except perhaps an equally degenerate group of fallen amateurs and creeps of dubious condignity. A true Cinderella among the streets of Lodz. And all because she has always been a bit... fatter, which God forbid is not a vice for the street. It's just that in this country, it's such an unfortunate kind of street beauty, which may be its greatest advantage, but for Zachkosia has turned out to be a curse. After all, what does one do in Poland with streets that are slightly wider? Well, exactly. They are not written to have the fate of beautiful avenues, instead they are sent to heavy works, letting in more traffic than they can fit. All in realization of the delusions of the modernist city of the machine, even though these blandly never matched the character of the dense downtown fabric of Lodz, which was born in a completely different era.
The space of West Street and Kosciuszko Avenue is so ruined that, apart from the impression of abundant shame that it brings to this city with its totality, it is actually very difficult to grasp what one is actually looking at. I'll admit that I had to do some digging in archival maps and photos to understand exactly what type of massacre was carried out on this street and to learn about its anatomy of tragedy.
Two main stages can be distinguished here—planned devastation and secondary devastation.
Lodz, Kosciuszko Avenue and West Street
photo: Pawel Mrozek
The problem was that although Kosciuszko Avenue and Zachodnia Street are now little different visually, this was not always the case. Kosciuszko Avenue was a carefully planned, high-ranking public space, much like Liberty Square, and surrounded by a sea of blocks intersected by narrow streets. Its character was intended to attract the weight of the city center. This became the pretext for squeezing the current two-lane road with a streetcar into it. A road that could not be continued northward in the footprint of West Street. After the war, however, they didn't care about such things. A mad urban planner's hairdresser came along and with his development trimmer, drove from top to bottom the width of Kosciuszko Avenue, chopping West Street blindly through the quarters until he got the width of the street he wanted. Admittedly, this was a murder like many in postwar Poland, although in fact it happened most often in cities already ruined by the war, where, in order to carry out such a route, it was mainly enough to clean up the rubble. Apparently, however, the authorities of Lodz at the time envied the wartime destruction of other cities and decided that Lodz, which had escaped the worst of the wartime turmoil, needed a catch-up so as not to stand out with its beauty from the country's post-war devastation. And so the bristling backs of tenement houses, the broken rolling outbuildings replaced the frontages, and garbage cans and parking lots replaced the gardens at the back of the tenements on Piotrkowska Street.
Why was this pointless? Imagine a situation where you have a bathtub for your bathroom, which is 1.8 meters long, but you only have 1.6 meters of space for it. If a post-war urban planner had to arrange the interior of you with a bathroom, he would have simply cut it down with an angle grinder, and add to it hour-long elaboration on what a modern approach it was. Both the bathtub and the city cut off with a grinder will not work, but for some reason, when making urban planning decisions, we didn't care about it..
Lodz, Kosciuszko Avenue and West Street
Photo: Pawel Mrozek
The secondary stage of the devastation of the Kosciuszko-Western route was already how it was used later. I am convinced that after the war, until the 1980s, urban planners and city authorities did not attach any importance at all to maintaining historic buildings. Even the new street was treated as something temporary and makeshift, until the People's Republic of Poland was such a rich socialist paradise that we could start tearing down all those old, ugly and bourgeois cities so we could replace them with beautiful blocks of flats. In those days, the 19th-century and pre-war buildings were just temporary workers' housing, meant for workers to build a proper socialist utopia of the surrounding neighborhoods, to then move there and demolish that city to build a continuation. And when we understand that this was the mentality of the people in charge of the city, and that they often, was involved even to the 2000s in their positions, the way the housing stock or streets in Lodz are maintained will cease to surprise us at all. It all looks as if someone deliberately planned the doom of this city, because... someone indeed deliberately planned it, only because of poverty it failed to be carried out. Unfortunately, what it was supposed to look like we don't have to just imagine.
Downtown Residential District in Lodz
Michal Oziębło | Wikimedia Commons © CC BY 3.0
As a result of this tragic approach to maintaining the city center of Lodz, no one bothered with renovations or thought about how to fill in the gaps and missing teeth in the patchy development, leaving it with a gappy smile towards the sidewalks for decades. The deteriorating condition of the roads through vibration and shaking from the rolling traffic was like a constant earthquake of 2 to 4 degrees of magnitude, often bringing the rest of the development to a state of technical agony. Streets were completed with nothing, no idea, no input from people responsible for any aesthetics, and that's how they look today. Like a museum collection of haphazard assortment of building and road products.
Lodz, Kosciuszko Avenue and West Street
photo: Pawel Mrozek
Historically, however, it was due to its width that Kosciuszko Avenue was the greenest street in Lodz and a coherently aesthetically designed space. Hence the name avenue, which in today's Poland's popular perception has already completely detached itself from its meaning, being a street whose design is dominated—and I will emphasize itclearly—dominated by rows of trees, not potted stumps interspersed with some dying trees waiting to magically turn into another parking space on the sidewalk. Kosciuszko itself, by the way, developed somewhat later than such a Piotrkowska street, and experienced its boom in the interwar period. For all intents and purposes, this work was never completed, hence a lot of precious pre-war eclecticism and modernism on it, which is reminiscent in places of downtown Gdynia, only one from a grim alternative reality in which it became the object of ruthless Soviet bombing. This shows, however, that Lodz was still developing vigorously in those days, and that its growth did not stop with the partitions of Poland.
Lodz, Kosciuszko Avenue before the war
© Lodz Trams and Buses
Lodz, Kosciuszko Avenue and West Street
© Lodz Trams and Buses
Aerial photo of the center of Lodz, 1942
https://stareplanymiast.pl
In this context, it's particularly disheartening to think how the legacy of the already free Poland was treated, located on a street that has even better conditions to be the best street of this city than Piotrkowska itself. As a matter of fact, apart from its beautiful architecture, Piotrkowska does not have, as they say, particularly favorable physical conditions for being a good public space. It is, in fact, quite narrow and devoid—probably already for good—of greenery. It's intriguing and touristy, but it can also be antipathetic. How many kebabs and convenience store of the same brand can you put on one street? Noise dna reverberation is also a problem. When someone rumbles a hundred meters away in the evening, it still feels like it's happening right behind your back. Piotrkowska has reached its maximum and further loading resources into it will not change much.
The central part of Downtown Lodz, view of both main compositional axes
© Google Maps
Meanwhile, right next door is a street that needs a lot, but promises even more. This is because Kosciuszko Avenue and West Street have no such limitations as Piotrkowska. With a width varying from 35 to 30 meters, compared to only 18 meters on Piotrkowska, it can easily accommodate a streetcar and a lane of roadway for local traffic, andeven so, there will still be 10 meters left on each side for greenery, wide sidewalks, bicycles and whatever your heart desires, and even if you put it right you could make a linear park out of it. This is not a minor advantage, it is a crushing advantage and potential for development that could easily allow this street to surpass Piotrkowska Street in every way in the next decades. I say this with full conviction, even though I am aware that Piotrkowska today is regarded as one of the best streets in Poland, if not in Europe.
Piotrkowska Street
photo: Pawel Mrozek
Lodz is a city that I have happened in recent years in various discussions to repeatedly praise or defend some realizations and solutions. I have the feeling that I undoubtedly have some kind of strange affection for this city, which, however, it doesn't really deserve. However, if it were only a matter of poverty that makes Lodz fail, well, then indeed one could only hug it and stroke it saying „don't worry, I suffer too when I look at you,” but the many investments with momentum that have been made in recent years or decades show that this city does have energy and resources after all. It' s just loading it into concrete, completely abandoning natural treasures such as the streets just discussed. It seems as if it is still, to some extent, pursuing a vision of the planned destruction of its Downtown. We have the concrete plazas around the new train station, or the transit bays around the Unicorn Stables (popular name for main tram station in city center), which are the most dehumanizing public spaces in this country, while Kosciuszko Avenue and Western Street are crumbling. Admittedly, back in the deep communist era, it could somehow be argued that such a north-south thoroughfare was necessary here, as all the country's automobile traffic had to squeeze through the cramped downtown of Lodz. Today, however, with the A1 motorway and other alternative road options within the city, as well as plans for turbulent development of public transportation, the justification for the existence of such a sore point as the north-south route in this location has completely faded away. After all this crazy period in urban development, for which we have wasted almost a century, it is finally possible to return to building a healthy beautiful European city, and Kosciuszko Avenue and West Street are the ideal place to inaugurate such a process with a bump, but one would first have to have a vision for the development of Downtown Lodz. Do we have it? By looking at the fact that the city until recently planned to pour hundreds of millions into this freway type of investment, and is still planning to do so, only in a slightly different shape, I doubt it, because it implies a complete misunderstanding of the changing pattern of people's lives and investment priorities.
The once-planned cable-stayed flyover in the center of Łódź
© Press materials of the City of Lodz
Its absence of vison, combined with Lodz's overwhelming revitalization needs, is a murderous combination that makes this city virtually disappear in sight. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that if we don't immediately take such measures as a decent green revitalization of Kosciuszko Avenue and Western Street, combined with the withdrawal of the devastating transit and extensive reconstruction of the frontages, we will deprive it over the next decade of the remnants of the values beeing the only reason its still have a dormant potential. Left almost entirely to the elements, the processes degrading Downtown Lodz mainly stigmatize this city, giving it a fully deserved bad image, which will not be changed by a few taller buildings and the odd train station surrounded by highways. And such an image is, unfortunately, fully deserved, because for the past three decades the authorities of Lodz have not even managed to correctly identify the spatial-functional problems of its own Downtown, since hundreds of millions go on building inland aircraft carriers and concrete squares, while the real treasures rot untouched by human hands. Such development will impress no one even in Poland. With this, it is only possible to become champions in a league of much smaller cities than ourselves, while on the other hand, we have forgotten a pre-war Downtown like no other.
And now the sad truth at the end. All that trip to the future I took to Lodz's famous „Zachkos” avenue, which is the pride of this city in the year 2044, never really happened and is only literary fiction. I know, this may have come as a surprise to some. Although my imagination can wander through time and space, unfortunately, through the eyes of this imagination I see a different and sad future for this place. Yes it will change, but not the way wewould like it to. A few more tenements will collapse, for sure, and they will be replaced by various boring boxes of uninteresting office buildings, fitting into their surroundings like a square peg in a round hole, and rental housing developed from a roll with dead ground floors. I also see new even asphalt, parking meters, yellow barriers and a ring of traffic signs smelling of newness. Finally, I see the fear on the faces of the officials who will carry this out, and a whole host of remedial measures spilled out of a bag called „greenwashing,” and in the end I see wasted hopes and missed opportunities and a street that is barely mediocre at best and kneeling before the ideals that were supposed to finish this city. This time to say goodbye, unfortunately, I won't pat you on the back or offer words of comfort. I'm afraid that some things can no longer be reformed.
But I don't want to just leave you with feeling sad.
I want you to feel angry.
