Piotrkowska Street

Stand on Liberty Square and look south. A straight line of stone facades runs away from you until it dissolves into haze. This is Piotrkowska Street, the spine of Łódź. It runs for about 4.2 kilometers, which makes it one of the longest commercial streets in Europe. Almost everything that ever happened in this city happened here, or close by.

The name is older than the city's fame. This was the road that led south toward the town of Piotrków Trybunalski. In the early nineteenth century it was a rutted track between wooden houses and fields. Travelers passed through and forgot the place. There was not much to remember.

Then cotton changed everything. In the 1820s the authorities chose Łódź as a site for textile manufacturing. Weavers came from Germany and Bohemia. Merchants followed. Mills rose along the new plots, and chimneys with them. Within two generations, a village of a few hundred people grew into one of the great industrial cities of Europe. People called it the Polish Manchester. The novelist Władysław Reymont called it the promised land, and he did not mean it kindly.

Begin at Liberty Square, the octagonal plaza at the street's northern end. At its center stands Tadeusz Kościuszko, hero of Poland's fight for independence. German occupiers pulled the monument down in 1939. After the war the city raised it again, and he watches over the street's northern gate once more.

Now walk, and look up above the shop signs. The facades rise in waves of ornament: carved faces, iron balconies, plaster garlands, small towers and domes. Art Nouveau curves stand beside strict classical lines. The factory owners made their fortunes in cotton, and they displayed those fortunes in stone. Each family built a house grander than the neighbor's. The street became a catalog of ambition, four kilometers long.

Łódź is also Poland's film city. Its film school, founded after the Second World War, trained directors such as Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polański, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The street remembers them. Near the Grand Hotel, bronze stars are set into the pavement, a Walk of Fame for Polish cinema. Actors, directors, and cinematographers shine under your feet as you pass.

The city honors its other children in bronze along the way. Artur Rubinstein, one of the great pianists of the twentieth century, was born in Łódź in 1887; his statue sits at a grand piano, caught in mid-performance. The poet Julian Tuwim rests on a bench, and touching his nose is said to bring luck; it gleams from thousands of hands. Reymont himself, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, sits on an oversized travel trunk, waiting for a train that no longer comes.

Listen to the street as you walk. Bicycle rickshaws hum past, the local way to cover this long, straight distance. Trams rattle across the junctions. Cafe chairs scrape the pavement in summer. Buskers claim the corners in the evening, and in December strings of holiday lights hang the full length of the street.

The real life of Piotrkowska often waits behind it. Street gates lead into deep courtyards, and many hold surprises. At number 138, a former cotton factory has become OFF Piotrkowska, a yard of food stalls, design studios, galleries, and clubs, with rust and raw brick left honestly in place. It is one of the liveliest corners of the city after dark.

At number 3, find Rose's Passage. The artist Joanna Rajkowska lined the courtyard walls with thousands of mirror fragments and dedicated the work to her daughter Róża. On a bright day, the walls scatter light like broken water.

The street has known parades and riots, occupation and rebirth. In 1905, striking workers faced tsarist soldiers in these blocks. Under German occupation in the Second World War, the street lost its name and many of its people. Under communism, the facades turned gray with coal smoke. The 1990s brought closed factories and empty shopfronts, and the street's future looked uncertain.

Renewal came step by step. Houses were cleaned and repaired. Courtyards reopened. New restaurants moved into old banking halls, and festivals, light shows, and street fairs turned the roadway into a stage. Today the street is busy from morning coffee to late music.

Walk the whole line if your legs allow it, from Liberty Square down to Independence Square. Few streets anywhere carry so much of one city's fate in a single straight line. Fortunes were made and lost along these four kilometers. The cotton is gone. The ambition is still standing, carved above your head.