Moniuszki Street in Łódź — the former Meyer's Passage

A street built on a rumour

In the early 1880s Łódź was full of talk that the city would take over from Piotrków as capital of the governorate. The manufacturer Ludwik Meyer believed it and built an entire street of apartments for the tsarist officials who were expected to arrive. The municipal authorities approved his plan in May 1885. The capital never moved; the street stayed.

It was probably the second private street in the city — the first, Solna, had been approved in 1863. Carriage traffic was restricted at times, while pedestrians passed freely. Until 1915 it was known as Meyer's Passage, and it has carried the name of the composer Stanisław Moniuszko since 1919, apart from the occupation years, when the German administration renamed it Dietrich-Eckart-Straße.

Meyer handed the street over to the city for nothing in 1905 or 1906. It was connected to the municipal sewers before 1937 and asphalted in the same period; until then the roadway was laid with wooden blocks and the pavements with sandstone slabs.

The first electric light in town

In early 1887 the passage became the first street in Łódź with electric lighting. The current came from a dynamo in the cellar of number 3, and it lit not only the roadway but the individual houses and their gardens. The villas had gas and water-and-sewer plumbing from the start, a privilege of the very few in a factory city that had no general water supply.

The neighbours noticed. In mid-1895 the Piotrków weekly Tydzień called it the most beautiful street in Łódź. Its residents included the city's mayor Władysław Pieńkowski, the Jarociński family of manufacturers, the lawyer Henryk Elzenberg, co-founder of the local daily, and the photographer Bronisław Wilkoszewski, whose pictures remain the main visual record of old Łódź. Meyer himself lived at number 4 until 1901.

House by house

• Number 4 — Meyer's own villa of 1887, now a post office
• Number 4a — the YMCA building, raised between 1932 and 1935 to a design by Wiesław Lisowski and used as a youth palace from 1952 to 1993
• Number 5 — the Trianon villa of 1887, home of the mayor and studio of Wilkoszewski, since 2022 the Mediateka MeMo library
• Numbers 6 and 8 — two linked Meyer villas; before the war one housed the Azov-Don Bank, where the father of the poet Julian Tuwim worked
• Number 7/9 — another Meyer villa, home from 1888 to 1892 to the offices and printing works of the daily Dziennik Łódzki
• Number 10 — the corner building towards Sienkiewicza, a post and telegraph station from 1886
• Number 2 — the ground floor held the celebrated Honoratka café from 1948 to 1975

One architect, one client

The villas are attributed to Hilary Majewski, the municipal architect of Łódź, who shaped much of the city's grander nineteenth-century building. The style is neo-Renaissance: calm façades, rustication on the ground floor, cornices and window surrounds following Italian models rather than the exuberant eclecticism that came later.

The result is a street that reads as a single composition, which is unusual here: Łódź mill owners normally built their residences each to their own taste. The even rhythm comes from having one client and one designer who finished the job within a few years.

Listed, and brought back

The urban ensemble and several individual buildings were entered in the register of monuments on 20 January 1971, the street itself under the number A/49. Villas 6 and 8 are covered by a separate entry.

The street also lies within the Monument of History "Łódź — the multicultural landscape of an industrial city", recognised on 16 February 2015. The spine of that listing is Piotrkowska street together with the ensembles of Freedom Square and Moniuszki.

In 2014 the city decided to rebuild the street as a woonerf, a shared surface where pedestrians have priority, and to convert numbers 3 and 5 into a multimedia library. The completion date slipped more than once, and the first readers walked into the Mediateka in 2022. The façades also served as projection screens for the Light Move Festival in 2012, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Getting there

• On foot — the street turns off Piotrkowska, the main axis of the centre, so you pass it on any walk through town
• Tram and bus — stops are on Piotrkowska and Sienkiewicza; no line has ever run along Moniuszki itself
• By train — fifteen minutes' walk west of Łódź Fabryczna station
• Nearby — Freedom Square, Piotrkowska and the Poznański Palace are all a short walk away

Before you go

Walking from one end to the other takes a quarter of an hour, but look into the courtyards and at the garden elevations: the passage was planned as a group of houses set in greenery, and that intention still shows. Late afternoon is the best light, when the sun reaches the northern side of the roadway.

Most of the interiors now belong to offices and institutions, so this is a street you visit from the outside. The one building anyone can walk into is the library in the Trianon villa; the rest is architecture to be read from the pavement.

How to get there and practical info

Location

central Łódź, running from Piotrkowska to Sienkiewicza street

Length

about three hundred metres

Former name

Meyer's Passage, after the manufacturer Ludwik Meyer; the present name dates from 1919

Built

plan approved in May 1885, the villas in 1887

Highlights

Meyer's neo-Renaissance villas, the 1930s YMCA building, the Trianon villa with the Mediateka MeMo library

Claim to fame

the first street in Łódź with electric lighting, from early 1887

Protection

register of monuments, entries of 20 January 1971 (the street under A/49); inside the Monument of History "Łódź — the multicultural landscape of an industrial city", 16 February 2015

Time needed

fifteen minutes to walk it, an hour with the courtyards

Current hours and tickets

the street is open and free; for heritage and visiting information see the city architect's official portal

When to go