Tri-Cities. What are the New Bourgeois waiting for?
The New Bourgeois - a vision of the contemporary identity of the Tri-City resident
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After the war, everything changes. Gdynia ceases to be a monopoly, Poland gains ports in Szczecin, Swinoujscie, Kolobrzeg, Ustka, Darlowo and, above all, Gdansk. Gdansk is completely ruined after a massive bombardment by the Red Army. Sopot falls into Polish hands in better condition.
Sopot from the sky - where Monciak meets the somewhat controversial new city center
© UM Sopot
Thus ends the latest chapter in the history of the three separate cities. And a new era begins: the Tri-City is created. This does not happen right away, of course. It takes time for displaced pre-war residents, those who survived, to return to Gdynia. Sopot and Gdansk are also taken over by local Poles - not many, but they are there. The times are unheard of: the post-war euphoria is being felt, the greatest traumas in history need to be healed. Poland under Soviet rule loses its eastern lands, gaining the so-called Recovered Territories from displaced Germans. It is known that sometimes not recovered at all, but since the Germans called Gdynia the Port of Goths....
There is an influx of tens and hundreds of thousands of displaced people to Gdansk and Sopot. It's an unusual mix, but it's not like in Wroclaw or Szczecin, where the restart of the system is complete. Here, the rebuilding is also being done by Polish-speaking, pre-war locals. Gdynia is regaining its spirit in no time, Gdansk and Sopot have to be redefined from scratch, but the Kashubian element plays such an important role in this that it is absolutely not a takeover of a completely foreign space. The cities of the future Tricity are attractive not only to the Zabużeans, also residents of other parts of Poland are drawn en masse to Pomerania - modern, with promising infrastructure despite the war, and opening up completely new perspectives and paths of development.
In practice, this happens in waves - guests from the depths of Poland come first for looting (see the otherwise excellent film "Law and Fist" with the cult song in the lead). A while later, to settle and rebuild. In Warsaw, a decision is made to rebuild Gdansk's magnificent Old Town. This happens at the expense of Elblag - from Elblag's demolition, from Elblag's bricks grow the mock-ups of two old cities, as besides Gdansk, also Warsaw's Old Town.
Slowly both major seaports are starting up, with Gdynia playing a dominant role in the transit of goods. On a full scale, since the spectacular lifting of the aforementioned battleship Gneisenau - to this day the record-breaking largest hydroengineering operation of its kind - no one has ever lifted a major warship wreck from the bottom.
Gdynia is quickly returning to form. Gdansk and Sopot are gradually rebuilding and populating. In the 1950s, a landmark investment is launched for the forming Tri-City, so to speak: here I mean the SKM, or Rapid Urban Rail. It's interesting to note that the first trainsets were pre-war Berlin S-Bahns taken over as war reparations, powered by electricity other than the communist standard, thanks in part to rectifiers from German submarines, the U-Boats.
It's the escaemia that makes up the Tri-City. A single agglomeration and a stereotype that still works today: live in Gdynia, walk in Gdansk, party in Sopot. In the 1970s and 1980s, eskaemka carried more than 100 million passengers a year! Today it's about 43 million - the Tri-City has lived to see a highway bypass and decent public transportation, which have taken over half of the former rail passenger stream.
At this point it is worth stopping for a moment. Because while it was easy and intuitive to get from Gdansk to Sopot, the connection between Gdynia and Sopot was not at all as simple as it may seem today. Before the war, the Grand Avenue, linking Gdansk with the then separate city of Wrzeszcz, connected with today's Sopot's Independence Avenue. From Zoppot at the time, streetcar line No. 7 traveled this way to Danzig, passing another then-separate city, Oliva, on the way.
Meanwhile, between Zoppot and Gdynia, natural isolation was provided - in addition to the national border - by the relief of the terrain, the topography specific to the Tricity. Rising 150-200 meters above sea level here, the frontal moraines are quite a serious communication barrier. To convince yourself of this, it is worth trying to cover the route from Sopot to Gdynia and back by bicycle - it is not at all easy, especially if you want to take a different route than along the axis of Independence Avenue-Zwyciestwa Avenue. The 90-meter-high Kępa Redłowska ending in the Orłowski Cliff is an impassable offroad with a nature preserve on more than 120 hectares of forest. Further on there is a belt of hills - through Kolibki up to the 205-meter high Donas Hill. Walking along the beach from Sopot to Gdynia (or vice versa) will be quite a walk - there will be more than 10 kilometers of sand to cover. Behind the Orlowski Cliff we will still pass the Redlowski Cliff and Kamienna Gora - it is only after this that more convenient terrain begins. On the other hand, the transportation axis running through Kamienny Potok and Kolibki has to rise 35 meters and then descend for a couple of kilometers - which for the builders of the first railroad line was no small height difference. Moraine hills for variety are cut by deep ravines of streams - Swelina, Kolibkowski and Kacza. They are a natural impediment, effectively cutting off the Polish and German parts of the Tricity from each other.
The moraine piles up over the Tricity, surrounding it with forest and separating Gdynia from Sopot
© UM Gdynia
What emerges from this three-dimensional perspective is a physical barrier, effectively isolating Gdynia from Sopot and Gdansk until the 1950s. The moraine in general is a key factor in understanding the Tricity: while the Baltic is the obvious dominant feature, shaping the maritime character of the metropolis, the more abstract moraine introduces a rather unexpected forest-mountain paradigm to the Tricity. You can see it in this green photo above....
