Monument to the Three Manufacturers

At Piotrkowska 30/32, on the pavement of the pedestrian mall, three men in clothes from the nineteen-twenties sit at a bronze table. This is the Monument to the Three Manufacturers, officially known as the Creators of Industrial Łódź.

Who the group at the table represents

The three seated men are Israel Poznański, Karol Scheibler and Henryk Grohman, industrialists once called the kings of Polish cotton. In the second half of the nineteenth century, they built large textile mills in Łódź around which the factory city grew.

Unveiling and author

The monument was unveiled in September 2002. It was designed by sculptor and cultural animator Marcel Szytenchelm, the same artist who created the entire series of sculptures known as the Gallery of Great Łódź Citizens – open-air bronze monuments placed along Piotrkowska from 1999 onwards, commemorating figures connected with the city. Nearby in the same series stands the Monument to the Lamplighter.

A bench to sit on

The sculptures of the Gallery of Great Łódź Citizens were designed as so-called memorial benches: at the table next to the manufacturers there is a free place where a passer-by can sit and take a photograph. The same idea is repeated in other monuments in the series scattered along the entire street.

An unusual installation history

After its first unveiling, the monument stood on the pavement for only five hours before being dismantled to complete the formalities related to placing the sculpture in public space. It was reinstalled at the end of October 2002 in the location where it stands today. The appearance of the sculptures from the Gallery of Great Łódź Citizens provoked considerable controversy in artistic circles, with criticism that they were clumsy references to nineteenth-century realism.

Surroundings

The two brick front houses where the bronze manufacturers now sit were built in the early 1870s for the Kessler family, related to the Gehlig family - both families had come to Łódź from Rawicz. This section of Piotrkowska is a dense row of historic tenements from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A few dozen metres further on, at Piotrkowska 11, stands the Scheibler Family Tenement, and across the street operates Galeria Rynek Sztuki.

Practical information

• Address: Piotrkowska Street 30/32, Śródmieście [city centre district], Łódź
• Getting there: city centre, trams and buses to stops at Piotrkowska/al. Piłsudskiego or Piotrkowska/Narutowicza
• What to expect: open-air monument accessible without time restrictions, free space at the table encourages photographs