Zachary J. Violette is the 2018 recipient of the short-term H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise noted.
It has been quite a whirlwind since my last entry in April, made on a balcony in Bucharest. In that time not only have I visited five additional cities and spent a couple months stateside to attend the SAH and Vernacular Architecture Forum conferences, I am now back on the second and final leg of my short-term Brooks Fellowship. Instead of running through a narrative of each of the places I’ve visited—I’ll cover all of these in a subsequent entry—today I wanted to focus on just one place—Łódź, Poland—somewhat on the beaten path, unlike most of my other stops, but one of the highlights of my itinerary.
Indeed, I had Łódź in mind when I was formulating my proposal for the fellowship period. As I have noted before, I set out to study the cities of central and eastern Europe, with a focus on their 19th century growth. Most of these places followed a similar growth trajectory, usually a late medieval and baroque core of an old town, ringed by blocks of apartment houses that were developed in the half century or so before World War I. The relationship between those two kinds of places was what I was most fascinated by in my entry this spring. But Łódź is not that sort of place. Instead it is a nineteenth-century industrial boomtown, more like Chicago in that way, than is typical of Europe, even if many of these cities also grew rapidly. As late as the 1820s its population was under a thousand. By the time of its peak at the start of World War I it had a population of nearly half a million. What little there was of an old town was swallowed up by nineteenth-century growth. The city was perhaps most famous as the location of Władysław Reymont’s 1898 novel The Promised Land, chronicling the experience of the migrants from the rural countryside to the industrial city. The population there was notably diverse, a multi-ethnic society made up of ethnic Poles as well as Jewish settlers from the countryside, migrants from Germany and other parts of Europe, as well as officials from Russia. In the early twentieth century the city claimed to be among the most densely populated on earth. It was tenement city, one with architecture very much of the region, but on an industrial scale. And, compared to Warsaw and Berlin, two other cities that had similar landscapes, much of Łódź escaped the horrors of the twentieth century with a large majority of its nineteenth century buildings intact.
About 90 minutes by train from Warsaw, Łódź’s central location, and access to natural resources and labor made it the textile manufacturing center of the Russian Empire (of which this part of Poland was then a part). Its landscape is fabulously instructive, especially in comparison to the textile landscapes of the industrial northeast of the United States, with which I am quite familiar. Łódź town plan, such as it was, was clearly platted with agricultural occupation in mind, with comparatively narrow, very deep lots set on gridded streets of long blocks. There is little center of which to speak, nothing like the town squares of the older settlements in the region. (The pre-industrial old market square became the center of the infamous Łódź Ghetto during World War II, was destroyed by the Nazis, and rebuilt in a Soviet realist style). The Plac Wolności, a circular plaza at the crossing of two major streets, is the center of the “new” city, the location of a number of important churches, including the domed Church of Pentecost, as
