Former textile capital reborn — street art, film school, and the Manufaktura
Łódź (pronounced 'Wudge') was Poland's Manchester — a 19th-century textile powerhouse built almost from scratch in less than 100 years by German, Jewish, and Polish industrialists, whose red-brick factory palaces and working-class tenements fill the city grid. Deindustrialization after communism left it depressed; the last 20 years have turned it into Poland's most interesting post-industrial city: the 100,000 sq m Manufaktura complex (the old Poznański textile mill) is now a museum, hotel, cinema, and restaurant compound; Piotrkowska Street is Europe's longest pedestrian high street; and the…
Łódź's extraordinary rise happened in a single century. In 1793 it was a village of 190 people; by 1900 it was the second largest city in the Russian Empire's Polish territories, with 314,000 inhabitants — faster growth than almost any city in European industrial history. The industrialists who built it left their factory palaces behind: Karol Scheibler, Izrael Poznański, and Julius Heinzel each built complexes that rivalled the great industrial estates of Manchester or Lyon. The large Jewish population of Łódź (over 30% before 1939) was decimated in the Łódź Ghetto (the largest in Poland) du…