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Post by Bonobo on Jan 28, 2008 10:15:58 GMT 1
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Post by locopolaco on Apr 23, 2008 23:36:52 GMT 1
eye of the beholder buddy. it was an industrial center (textiles and such) for a long itme so it has that industrial feel to it. downtown's architecture is very ompressive however and i have heard that good things are happening in that town.
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Post by Bonobo on Apr 24, 2008 12:32:49 GMT 1
eye of the beholder buddy. it was an industrial center (textiles and such) for a long itme so it has that industrial feel to it. downtown's architecture is very ompressive however and i have heard that good things are happening in that town. Yes, it was a textile center. Apart from one High street (Piotrowska Street) and a few palaces of textile tycoons here and there, there is nothing interesting in Lodz. It is not only my opinion. I frequently run into it when I read articles about Polish cities. As for good things happening in it, yes, true, but it can be said about every Polish major city. Big cities always attract capital and would be really badly governed if they didn`t. I heard Lodz has a dynamic president. Mmmm, so you suggest that my description of Lodz in the first post here was a little provocation?  ;D ;D ;D ;D Of course not. There are other sights in Lodz too. It is a lovely city! ;D ;D |
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Post by locopolaco on Apr 24, 2008 22:09:14 GMT 1
yes, Piotrkowska is Main St.
nah, i'd say your second post is more. the most provocative post was in Warszawa thread and the pictures of dossers (bums) by central station.
btw. isn't Katowice uglier?
also not all cities are doing so well. some in SE PL are struggling from my understanding.
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Post by Bonobo on Apr 25, 2008 20:39:01 GMT 1
nah, i'd say your second post is more. the most provocative post was in Warszawa thread and the pictures of dossers (bums) by central station. hahahaha Yes, that was a great provocation. I did it to Livia, a zealous Warsawian. She has left for New York, but promised to come back to us one day. Yes, probably. Generally SE Poland is doing worse than its central or west parts. But I think it refers more to towns and villages, not cities. I still claim that big cities do better because they attract capital. |
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Post by Bonobo on Apr 25, 2008 22:06:20 GMT 1
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 13, 2009 21:41:06 GMT 1
Despite the Downturn, a Polish City Thrives
By CARTER DOUGHERTY
The New York Times
8/31/09
LODZ, Poland — In the 19th century, the Polish novelist Wladyslaw Reymont titled his masterpiece about Lodz "The Promised Land" because the city attracted people from throughout Central Europe to work in its booming textile mills.
These days, the industries have changed, but something similar is happening again, helping Poland to escape the searing global recession.
With multinationals like Procter & Gamble, Dell and ABB leading a wave of foreign investment, cities like Lodz, in central Poland, are experiencing relative booms. Poles who left the country in search of work years ago are trickling back.
As its peers in Central and Eastern Europe face a very rough year, Poland is emerging as the one economy in the region that has the heft to withstand a vicious downturn. And it just may end up being the one economy in Europe that avoids an outright contraction in 2009.
One of the most flourishing corners of Lodz is a vast former textile factory that is now a complex of stores, restaurants and even a beach volleyball court. The brisk business at the site, known as Manufaktura, illustrates how far Poland is removed from the searing experiences of Latvia or Hungary, not to mention London or New York.
"Maybe without the crisis, business would be better," said Slawomir Murawski, the director of Manufaktura. "But who knows?"
Poland has the advantage of being preoccupied with itself these days. Because it sells far less to the rest of the world than its neighbors, Poland is shielded from the vicissitudes of the global economy, while reaping its benefits, reflecting a wave of foreign investment. That, in turn, has helped keep its labor market strong at a time when many Europeans fear for their jobs.
The government reported Friday that Poland's economy expanded at an annual rate of 1.1 percent in the second quarter, bolstered by exports, construction and services.
Growth in gross domestic product was well above the 0.5 percent expected by analysts, as well as the first quarter's 0.8 percent annual rate of growth.
"We're the only country in the whole European Union that has such good growth, and we've come here to brag," Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at a news conference in Warsaw, Bloomberg News reported. "Poland is the E.U.'s undisputed growth leader."
At the beginning of the year, Poland suffered along with other emerging markets as investors pulled their money out en masse.
To the immense frustration of Polish business, however, the picture of the region for outsiders has been dominated by countries like Hungary, Latvia, Serbia and Ukraine, whose crushing debt loads drove them into the arms of the International Monetary Fund.
For Poland, a relatively light borrower, the crisis created a riptide in the form of a fast-depreciating currency, the zloty. That hurt some companies, namely those that had carefully hedged themselves against a rising currency, which was the previous year's problem. But Polish banks, keen to avoid driving their clients into bankruptcy, refinanced the hedges to reflect the new reality.
"In retrospect, the crisis proved manageable in Poland," said Ryszard Petru, chief economist at BRE Bank in Warsaw. "But it was hard to know at the time."
The zloty plunged 27 percent against the euro in the six months ended last March. It has since risen over 13 percent.
Poland has landed more softly than its neighbors because its economy is far less dependent on exports than other Central European countries, where exports can approach 90 percent of the gross domestic product.
Poland, a much larger nation of 38 million people, lives far more from domestic demand, and that depends on a stable labor market.
Mr. Petru predicts that unemployment will rise to 9.9 percent by the end of 2009, from 7.1 percent, but that is about even with the European Union average. And it masks some pockets of strong growth; the jobless rate is 2 percent in Warsaw, and about 8 percent in Lodz, or less than half what it was five years ago.
One reason for the surprise in Lodz is clearly the influx of foreign investment.
Procter & Gamble has one factory in Lodz and is opening another this fall. Fujitsu, the Japanese computer company, opened a service center in the city this year. Others include Infosys Technologies, the Indian information technology firm; ABB, the Swiss manufacturer of infrastructure equipment; and TNT, a Dutch logistics firm.
Even after the shock of last September, when the bankruptcy of the investment house Lehman Brothers sent global business into free fall, "companies in Lodz kept searching for labor," said Piotr Broncher, the Lodz regional director for Manpower, a provider of temporary employees. "I was surprised. Everybody was surprised."
Manpower will probably find jobs for 1,200 people in the Lodz area this year, down slightly from 1,500 in 2008.
Dell, the computer maker, made the investment that truly electrified Lodz.
In January, Michael S. Dell, the company's founder and chief executive, officially opened a 400,000-square- foot plant that will handle logistics and assemble computers, particularly for customers from Central and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Over the next three years, it will employ up to 3,000 people.
In a symbolic shift, Dell moved operations to Lodz from Limerick in Ireland. Ireland has protested the 52.7 million euros in subsidies that Dell got from the Polish government, but Dell cited the skilled work force in Lodz and proximity to growing markets as the reasons for its move.
The Irish boom, now possibly the worst bust in Europe, attracted many Poles, who worked with Dell there and are now finding their way home.
"We even have some workers in Lodz who have come from our Limerick, Ireland, factory and who are very happy to have come back to help set up this one," Mr. Dell said at the opening in January.
Tomasz Rybinski, 30, was among those Poles who left the country after it joined the European Union in 2004. He found work in then-booming Britain, where he spent three years mixing salads, moving boxes in a warehouse and then, finally, working in a factory that made industrial refrigerators.
Rumors this year that layoffs were in the works were enough to convince Mr. Rybinski that the new possibilities in his native Lodz trumped what had by then become a shattered British economy.
After taking some time off, he found a job quickly. He recently started work in a factory that produces monitor and computer parts as an operator of a machine that molds plastic into specific shapes.
"It's better to live in your home town," Mr. Rybinski said. "You get to see your family and friends more than just three times a year."
Financially, Mr. Rybinski said he would earn about the same monthly pay, the equivalent of about $500, that he earned in Britain.
The turnaround in Lodz has been startling for a municipality whose population was still declining as recently as three years ago.
Mr. Murawski, the director of Manufaktura, benefits from that growth. But one multinational on the horizon might be less welcome for his operation, which combines shopping, eating and entertainment for children.
This autumn, the Swedish retailer Ikea will open its own complex in Lodz, employing much the same strategy: bring them in to shop, but amuse them as well.
"That is likely to affect us much more than the crisis," Mr. Murawski said. "It is something concrete."
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Post by Bonobo on Oct 22, 2012 0:30:28 GMT 1
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Post by Bonobo on May 29, 2016 17:21:09 GMT 1
The posh Piotrowska Street at night Piotrowska Street is a real pearl in a generally ugly city. Piotrkowska Street (Polish: ulica Piotrkowska), the main artery of Łódź, Poland, is one of the longest commercial thoroughfares in Europe, with a length of 4.9 km. It is one of the major tourist attractions of the city. It runs longitudinally in the straight line between the Liberty Square (Plac Wolności) and the Independence Square (Plac Niepodleglości). From the very beginning this street was the central axis, around which the city grew bigger, and its development spontaneously gave the present shape to its centre. At first the city was mainly the highway, but later it changed into the city's showcase, the leisure and shopping centre, where the life of growing industrial agglomeration could be observed. The street deteriorated remarkably after the World War II. Only after 1990 was it revitalized step by step and changed into a kind of pedestrian precinct. It has a function similar to a market square of old towns in other cities. Nowadays the buildings, town-planning, institutions, restaurants, clubs and pubs situated next to this street, create its specific atmosphere, which is said to have a "cult" character reaching even outside of Łódź.
The History
In the beginning, the present Piotrkowska Street functioned as a route joining Piotrków Trybunalski and Zgierz. On this path a small, roadside urban settlement called Łódź was located. In 1821 Rajmund Rembieliński - the president of the Commission of the Province of Mazovia - took some action in order to regulate the building development in the industrial settlement. This settlement was called The New Town and it was situated in the south from the "old" Łódź. On the street plan of the settlement, the route line was outlined, and along it the cross streets and standard 17,5–21 meters wide plots with a surface area of one morgen, allotted to weaving craftsmen. Standard houses were built on those plots – a workshop, which stood facing the route, whereas the rest of the plot was a "garden" for the owner's family. At the northern end of the route, the New Town Market was outlined (now the Liberty Square), which had stood in the south from the Old Town Market. At first (around 1815) the name Piotrkowska Street was used to describe the northern part of the route joining both markets, whereas the southern part (the present Piotrkowska Street) didn't have any name. This means that Piotrkowska Street was a kind of courtyard and market for the huge "manufacture of Łódź", so for the whole New Town. The fact that Łódź had this function, is the reason why in this city never developed anything like a classical city centre with a centrally situated market and co-centrally expanding commercial institutions and public organizations, and Piotrkowska Street took on this role.
Revitalization
Before 1990 Piotrkowska Street didn't differ much from other streets, although it was the most important street in the city. The plans of changing Piotrkowska Street into a pedestrian zone, resulted only in moving the trams to a horizontal Promenade (today called Kościuszki Avenue). Before this change the promenade had a function of a pedestrian avenue. In its centre there was a wide green belt, which later on was used as a tram line. There was not enough of political will to change Piotrkowska Street into a real pedestrian precinct, although this idea came back from time to time. The first step was the gradual reduction of street traffic by introducing "no parking" or "you must turn" signs on almost every crossroad from Mickiewicza Avenue to the Independence Square. In 1945-1990 the street suffered from the gradual degradation. Until the 1970s the old, eclectic tenement houses weren't considered by the authorities of those days as historic monuments. Several of them were destroyed and in their places office buildings and shopping centers were built, usually in the international style. In the 1980s some falling off decorative elements of the elevation, dangerous for the passers-by, were simply removed from the walls, even though the renovation of some chosen buildings had already begun.
The character of the street changed only after 1990. In this year an architect and a member of an artistic group Łódź Kaliska, Marek Janiak, came up with the idea of creating the Foundation of Piotrkowska Street. Its goal was to revitalize this street and turning it into a pedestrian precinct. As the first one, a distance between Piłsudskiego Avenue and Tuwima Street was excluded from traffic. It was covered with colorful cobblestones and equipped with modernistic street lights and other elements of the so-called street furniture. It was strongly criticized by art conservatives and culture historians, because it didn't suit the general climate of the street. The next parts of the street in the northern direction to the Liberty Square were revitalized and excluded from street traffic in 1993-1997. They were paved with black cobblestones imitating the old pavement and equipped with more and more beautiful elements of the so-called street furniture. Every new part, however, has another kind of surface and another style of decorative elements, which is being criticized as well. Even before the last part of the street, which was meant to be a pedestrian precinct, could be given to the public use, the cobblestones on the first part were remarkably destroyed. From 1995 those cobblestones were gradually replaced by the new ones, which were more grey in color and much more solid. That created a perfect opportunity to build in the Monument of the Lodz Citizens of Millennium Change. Together with the decoration change of Piotrkowska Street, tenement houses and little palaces standing next to it were revitalized. Some pubs, restaurants, shops and cafés moved inside them. At first mainly the front elevations of tenement houses were renovated, but as the popularity of the street increased and some of the most attractive buildings in the front were rented, revitalization gradually reached also backyards and back-premises. Nowadays, although not all of them, the huge amount of backyards is paved with cobblestones and used in trading and gastronomical purposes.
Today
Today Piotrkowska Street is the axis of Lodz agglomeration. Here, in its proximity, almost all of the most important administrative offices, banks, shops, restaurants and pubs are situated. The most of the events, outdoor parties, marches and official celebrations, organized by the city of Lodz, are taking place here...
Piotrkowska, which was called by many people Bigel some time ago, now is more and more commonly described as Pietryna. It is a cultural, political, sentimental, commercial and business centre of Lodz. Between Tuwima Street and Nawrot Street there is the Monument of Lodz Citizens of Millennium Change, which is a nominal surface covering the part of Piotrkowska Street. This is probably the only monument of this kind in the world, consisting of 13.454 nominal cobblestones. Some time ago a huge shopping centre Galeria Łódzka was built next to Piotrkowska Street. This made many shops move from Piotrkowska Street, and that's why we could observe the visible standstill. But after about a year the empty spaces that remained after the previous shops, started to be used again, some of them, however, still stood empty in the beginning of 2006. In this group was one of the most representative- the former Dom Buta. The similar process is being observed after another shopping centre – Manufaktura - was opened next to the northern end of the street. The northern part of the street is pedestrianised, although emergency and 'security' vehicles are allowed to speed along it - and do with alarming hostility and frequency, even weaving between the numerous beer gardens in the summer. The width of Piotrkowska Street varies between 17 and 26 meters. The street is very long.
The road traffic
Starting from the Independence Square to the crossing with Mickiewicza and Piłsudskiego Avenues, there is a normal road traffic and this part of the street is covered with an ordinary asphalt and pavements made of concrete panels. On the part from the Independence Square to Żwirki and Wigury Streets, there still is quite an intensive bus and tram traffic. In spite of this, there are many shops, restaurants and pubs too, although they do not have such a representative character, as these located on the promenade.During the day:                     |
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;D ;D ;D ;D
