Poland - Eastern Europe - page 406

certainly merits a full day of exploration. The city can be visited as a long day trip from
Warsaw, but it's better approached as a destination in its own right. The prospect of
some excellent restaurants and a couple of nice hotels sweetens the deal.
L ód 3 is relatively young as Polish cities go. It only came into its own in the 19th cen-
tury, when German and later Jewish industrialists built large textile mills to exploit
access to the vast Russian and Chinese markets to the east. Unlike Kraków or Wroc l aw,
you'll search in vain here for a large market square, a Rynek, surrounded by gabled
baroque and Renaissance houses. Instead, you'll find—amid the tenements and badly
neglected housing stock—fine examples of the sumptuous neo-baroque and neoclassi-
cal mansions and town palaces favored by the wealthy 19th-century bourgeoisie.
By the start of the 20th century L ód 3 had grown from a village just a few decades
earlier to a city of more than 300,000 people, and its factories, mansions, and civic
institutions were among the finest in the country. It was a magnet for poor Poles from
around the country, but above all it attracted Jews, drawn here by the relatively toler-
ant social climate and economic opportunity. At its height, the Jewish community
numbered some 230,000 people, around a third of the city's immediate pre-World
War II population.
But if the city's economic rise was rapid, its decline was precipitous as well. At the
end of World War I, with the establishment of independent Poland, the city lost its
privileged access to the Russian and Far Eastern markets. World War II, and the Nazi
occupation, was an unmitigated disaster. While many of the buildings survived the
war intact, nearly the entire Jewish population was wiped out—first herded into a
massive ghetto north of the city center, and then shipped off train by train to the death
camps at Che l mo and Auschwitz-Birkenau. For decades after the war, the story of the
“Litzmannstadt” ghetto, as it was known at the time, was little known outside of
Poland. Now, Jewish groups from around the world are getting the word out. You can
tour much of the former ghetto as well as visit the Jewish cemetery, the largest of its
kind in Europe.
The Communist period brought more ruin to the city. The once-profitable mills
were run into the ground by inept state ownership. The city was blighted by some of
the most insensitive Communist-era planning to ever come off the drawing board.
The period since 1989 has seen a massive effort to transform the bleak postindustrial
cityscape into a lively cultural center. And that effort is partially succeeding. The heart
of the transformation is the city's main drag, Piotrkowska, a nearly 4km-long (2 1 ⁄ 2 -
mile) pedestrianized strip, lined with restaurants, cafes, bars, clubs, and shops. By day,
it's a place to stroll, window-shop, and take an open-air coffee. By night, it's arguably
Poland's most intense street party, filled with raucous revelers swilling beer from cans
as club music blares from behind nearly every door. Just to the north of the city cen-
ter, the huge complex of former textile mills has now been transformed into Europe's
biggest shopping and entertainment complex, Manufaktura.
L ód 3 also boasts one of Poland's best museums of modern art, and a clutch of other
interesting museums, many housed in the mansions of the old industrial elite. For fans
of international film, L ód 3 is home to the Poland's most highly regarded film school
and the country's only Museum of Cinematography. Legendary Polish film directors
Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Roman Pola ^ ski, among others, all learned
their craft here.