Green Space for All!

Warsaw communality of urban greenery in the second half of the 19th century and the interwar period

From the mid-1800s and over the course of the following century urban green space in Warsaw gained prominence. Green spaces expand, specialize, and increasingly shape the lives of residents. Parks, garden squares, urban lawns, leisure areas for laborers, children’s gardens, allotment gardens, communal green spaces in new housing estates and districts built using the Garden City concept, and all the new open public green spaces, significantly exemplify the social importance of urban greening.  

Developing urban greenery associates with the history of garden design on the one hand, and with modern urban concepts on the other. Bringing nature into urban spaces provides economic benefits for property owners in the city as well as provides for the social needs of residents. Green spaces provide key value to city dwellers in the way they support the pursuit of health, facilitate pastimes and recreation, and promote positive social connections.

The nineteenth century was the turning point in fostering the growth and significance of urban greenery. Progressing industrialization and economic pressure fueled socioeconomic changes that in turn radically influenced the face of the nation's cities. Traditionally made up of low-density low-rise buildings with a generous share of green spaces, cities shapeshifted into tight organisms that rose vertically, devoid of sunlight and access to fresh air, trees, shrubs, and grass. Increasing land prices and their limited supply rendered urban greenery an unnecessary burden since it yielded no revenue. At the same time, the lack of green space had a deteriorating effect on residents’ health, social life, and spatial aesthetic. The situation called for a complete redirection of urbanization.

A vital change occurred through the introduction of publicly accessible outdoor vegetation. The process created mutually beneficial relationships. Functionally, it promoted the personal hygiene, health, and well-being of city dwellers, while socially, it reinforced the civic fabric of community by cultivating a public platform of urban cohesion for as many residents as possible. At that time, a shift was also unfolding in the public perception of green spaces. What used to be a passive background for peaceful walks in a green park, square, or down a waterside walkway evolved into an arena of community engagement and care. Residents took to recreational activities often including sports, as well as active civic participation in cultivating and stewarding green spaces in their neighborhood. 

From Public Squares to Specialized Gardens

The first public urban green spaces developed as early as the 1600s in England. Among the earliest London open garden squares were Covent Garden, Bloomsbury Square, and Soho Square. The English commons afforded the people open urban spaces of grass and squares. Such areas were mostly privately owned, but jointly maintained in a regulated fashion as recreational zones. They became a model for European urban greening, which bloomed in the nineteenth century, significantly enhancing the spatial image of cities. 

Integrating green spaces into the urban environment marked the next turning point. Carried out for the first time by Georges Eugène Haussmann in his mid-1800s grand reconstruction of Paris (1852–1869), the project employed green spaces as the compositional feature fusing all urban development elements: from boulevards, to avenues, to squares. 

There appeared a network of public spaces mostly made up of vegetation bringing together the urban layout. Between 1852–1869 Paris acquired a system of wide, tree-lined streets, waterfront walkways, and promenades combining green city squares and urban parks into magnificent recreational spaces open to all. The Parisian transformation inspired many European cities. 

Spatial alterations of nineteenth-century cities resulted in new urban gardenscapes. The landscaping spectrum stretched from the landscape parks of the past to new and more compact forms designed for the benefit of all: garden squares, green squares, or green downtown promenades. Gardens began to enrich the surrounding grounds of hospitals and clinics. Green infrastructure comprised of allotment gardens, shared estate gardens, green school yards, learning gardens, and children’s gardens created to foster a range of recreational and educational opportunities for the youngest residents. 

Green Space for All, or Developing Social Engagement

Mid-nineteenth-century industrialization drew an influx of people resulting in the rapid urbanization of Warsaw at the cost of its green space. Belted with fortifications, the city stood unable to develop spatially. Most downtown plots became built up to a density of 80%. Well-like courtyards were dark and practically devoid of greenery. Lack of airflow and urban green landscape had a negative impact on mental and physical health of the people. An increasing body of evidence formed an issue that required close attention. Significantly, the communal urban greenspace was initiated by the residents. 

In 1889 the Municipality established the Civic Committee for Urban Greening Conservation focused on expanding the city green spaces. For years to come, the Committee was the sole entity nurturing Warsaw’s greenscapes. It championed the creation of new parks by initiating Ujazdów Park and Skaryszew Park, both designed by Franciszek Szanior, as well as children’s gardens, urban greening, and green squares. The Committee encouraged residents to pursue individual aspirations for the benefit of public green spaces by setting up backyard gardens, flower beds, or making their balconies greener.  

Laid out between 1893 and 1896 as an English landscape garden, Ujazdów Park stretches from the crossroads of Aleje Ujazdowskie and Piękna Street exemplifying a typical late-nineteenth century garden style. Created as a public park open to rich and poor alike, its location in an elegant district restricted access for the poorer class (Łupienko, 2019). 

It was not until Skaryszew Park, or Ignacy Paderewski Park, was created between 1909 and 1922 that a true public park took form. It offered free public access and met the requirements of recreation and leisure time for large numbers of citizens. The features included two artificial ponds, one of them with a waterfall, playground, and sports infrastructure of rowing docks, a soccer field, and a track and field stadium handed over to the University Sports Association in 1927. An extensive network of paths wide enough to allow a horse-drawn vehicle could also fit a car. In fact, other than dance and fashion shows,  the park grounds also hosted car shows with the newest models on display. With a rosarium and a dahlia garden, the park appealed to the sense of appreciation for nature. In the 1930s several sculptures populated the park, among them: Bathing Woman by Olga Niewska, Rhythm by Henryk Kuna, and Dancer by Stanisław Jackowski, thereby enriching how we perceive the aesthetic value of the park. 

A few years earlier, between 1865 and 1877, Praga Park became the first park laid out on the east bank of the Vistula River. Created by an administrative decision as an element of the partitioner’s political strategy to transform the Praga district into a sophisticated area emblematic of the Russian ethos, the park was not open to all. Admission to most of the park grounds was available at a charge. Prior to founding the park, the works included a range of preparation activities from leveling a waterlogged riverside area to planting trees, shrubs, flower beds and lawns, to installing the central path traversing the entire park. 

City Apples and Garden-Based Learning

The original urban garden was a pomological one, or an orchard. With practicality and research as its primary function, it also provided opportunities for education and recreation. It offered grounds for cultivating fruit trees and shrubs, studying existing species, and acclimating new ones. The first such city orchard in Warsaw was established by the Agronomic Institute in Marymont. When it closed in 1869, a second one replaced it in the Warsaw downtown block surrounded by Nowogrodzka Street, Leopoldyny (currently Emilii Plater) Street, and Teodora (currently Tytusa Chałubińskiego) Street, opening to the public the following year. Laid out as a nineteenth-century park, it also served as an urban orchard for city residents to walk among the fruit trees, rest on park benches, or buy fresh apples and pears in the season. The garden functioned until 1944 when it was destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising and its remains dismantled in 1950. In a sense, the pomological garden embodied the idea of urban gardening of its time.  

Folk Gardens, or Swings, Bowling Alleys, and Amusement Rides

Poor housing conditions would often drive residents from the lower and working class outdoors to spend time in places they created themselves, or spaces organized specifically for them.

For city dwellers, spending leisure time outdoors meant various types of entertainment and cultural events. Class status determined access to recreational areas. While the richest Varsovians exercised their right to leisure in the Swiss Valley Park opened in 1828, the poor were left to enjoy the outskirts of Powązki, Sielce, and Wierzbno. German craftsmen favored Schulz Garden in Czyste in the Wola district. 

Historically, on a warm spring or summer day, Warsaw residents would spend their free time in the Bielany district and Saska Kępa neighborhood. The latter hosted aristocratic amusements as early as the 1700s. In the following century, it showed a commitment to broader class representation. The ground lessees provided Varsovians with entertainment facilities such as rides, swings, and bowling alleys, as well as several inns and restaurants. 

The lower-middle class made up of city clerks, low ranking officers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, and small business owners took a liking to gardens that gave access to green spaces and for an admission charge offered the additional entertainment of shooting ranges, concerts, street theater, or foodservice. Feliks Rembaczewski Park ranked high among the popular leisure destinations of the mid-1800s offering both entertainment and nourishment. In 1840 the parkgoers reveled in the inconspicuous attraction of a railway. As reported in the paper of the day “before railway time, much-awaited in our land, a similar contraption was employed in miniature form. It is a type of carousel in Mrs. Rembaczewska’s garden between Leszno and Żytnia Streets. The apparatus required significant expenditure. There is an entrance charge of 10 groszy, and an additional 20 groszy should you fancy the revolving ride. Thirty-six people revolve simultaneously, which no mere waltz can ever match” (“List z Warszawy,” 1840).

Lower class residents convened on Sundays and bank holidays on the outskirts of Mokotów Field, one of the largest parklands in Warsaw, or in Młynów in the Wola district. The former offered generous grounds for games of skill and agility (pole climbing), swings, and merry-go-rounds whereas the latter encouraged the working class to rest and picnic. These outdoor leisurely activities among the city greenscapes have been captured in Konrad Brandel’s reportage photography. 

Green Wedges

The beginning of the 20th century enriched how people perceived the value of urban green spaces. Parks and green squares continued to appear, but with a significantly greater focus on comprehensive solutions for green planning in the urban environment on the one hand, and the role of green space in residential areas on the other. The political climate finally permitting, the Warsaw spatial layout began transforming after 1916 and continued into the interwar period. In 1916 Tadeusz Tołwiński and his team carried out the Preliminary Draft of an Urban Regulatory Plan for the City of Warsaw. It was an urban design re-shaping the city to enhance the housing conditions by incorporating urban solutions implemented in other European cities: a widening of streets, introducing a radial arrangement of streets, increasing the share of green areas, urban forestry projects, converting former fortifications into housing estates with an element of green infrastructure, and promoting the garden city movement. The authors of the Preliminary Draft aspired to bring fresh air into the city and ensure the health and well-being of the residents. The Draft stated that “to meet that objective it is essential that the urban forestry with its gardens, parks, and wide footpaths, wedge into the center of the city, stretching from the inner part outwards to connect the city to the countryside.” Such planning principles generated a process of subdividing former fortification areas and large farmlands. Architects and urban planners promoted the green wedge system, or a radially distributed network of green wedges within the urban fabric connecting the city center with suburbia. Another significant urban element was linking the city to the Vistula River. 

The Garden City, or Combining the Best of Town and Countryside

The next phase in the process of integrating nature with the residential function was the garden city, the brainchild of Ebenezer Howard,  first formulated in his ground-breaking To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898). Four years later it was reprinted as Garden Cities of To-Morrow. But the idea was not entirely new. In the late 1860s in the United States, urban designs would already combine low-rise residential buildings with vegetation. In 1869 Alexander Turney Stewart created a model suburban community on Long Island. Inspired by earlier designs such as the model villages of Port Sunlight and Bournville, both in England, as well as Frederick Law Olmsted’s Riverside, IL, or Colonel William Light’s 1837 design of the Australian city of Adelaide. 

According to Howard, the garden city is premised on the idea of “a city designed for healthy living”. Three principles were crucial: 1. Communal ownership of the land. 2. Limiting the size of the population and spatial expansion. 3. Maintaining a limited, functional equilibrium between urbanism and its landscape situation. The idea materialized in Poland in the early decades of the twentieth century, mostly as a garden settlement, town, or part of a city. These included the town of Ząbki located in the Warsaw Metropolitan Area (designed by T. Tołwiński, 1911), Młociny (designed by I. Miśkiewicz, 1913), Podkowa Leśna (designed by A. Jawornicki, 1925), Komorów, Nadarzyn, and Włochy, as well as the Warsaw neighborhoods Żoliborz Oficerski, Sadyba Oficerska, and Czerniaków.

Let us take a closer look at the last two, the civilian Garden City of Czerniaków, and the military Sadyba Oficerska. Despite the common underpinnings of the English idea of a Garden City, the two settlements were intended for diverse types of residents rendering different traits. Designed for the intelligentsia and officials, the Garden City of Czerniaków was populated by doctors, engineers, actors, lawyers, and industrialists. Sadyba Oficerska on the other hand was an exclusive estate created for high-ranking officers in the Polish Army: Marshal Józef Piłsudski's closest associates.

The plans for the first settlement hark back to the 1916 Preliminary Draft of an Urban Regulatory Plan for the City of Warsaw mentioned above. Laid out on the grounds surrounding Fort Sadyba west of Lake Czerniakowskie Nature Reserve, it was designed by two acclaimed architects and urban planners, Professor Oskar Sosnowski of the Warsaw University of Technology Faculty of Polish Architecture, and Antoni Jawornicki, Head of the planning office at the Municipality, and later the architect of Podkowa Leśna. 

In 1921 the design was ready. The creators intended to lay out an estate of houses with gardens where the benefits of town life, country beauty and healthfulness could be combined. In June 1936, Stefan Korab-Karpowicz commended the estate in the monthly Dom Osiedle Mieszkanie [House Estate Apartment]: “Only a few years back, the former Fort Sadyba moat was overgrown with vegetation, and all choked up with silt, ringed by nothing but pastures, with the nearest tram stop two kilometers away. Today, the land boasts a beautiful housing estate of the Sadyba Construction and Housing Cooperative covering an area 60,000 square meters.” (Korab-Karpowicz, 1936, pp. 15-20).

Initialized by Tadeusz Tołwiński, Sadyba Oficerska saw its completion under Aleksander Więckowski. The first houses with gardens appeared along the east side of Morszyńska and Okrężna Streets between 1924 and 1926. Photographer Henryk Poddębski captured their silhouettes. Part of the housing estate was also the officers’ block at numbers 1/3/5/7 on Morszyńska Street, designed by A. Więckowski in 1929.

In terms of urban greening, the Sadyba and Czerniaków layouts stemmed from appreciating the health benefits from bringing nature closer to home, cultivating it, and celebrating its beauty. Those settlements, however, provided that only on the personal level limited to a family. The next development offers a broader social dimension revolving around an entire estate. 

Innovative Architecture in Greenspaces

According to the ideological principles of the Modernist era, urban planners, and architects of the 1920s and 1930s attributed increasingly more significance to shaping the green spaces surrounding residential infrastructure. They recognized vegetation as an integral element of housing. Landscape architect Alfons Zielonko became a tenacious advocate of his maxim: “A home, in the modern sense of the word, is composed of indoor living and garden living.”  

Modernist housing estates found themselves radically divorced from the nineteenth-century idea of public green spaces materialized as green squares, promenades, or isolated parks. Urban greening integrated into residential areas, promoting a sense of belonging in the local community that cultivated it.

Keeping that in mind, let us take a closer look at one of the more significant modernist housing estates in Warsaw: the Warsaw Housing Cooperative in the Żoliborz district. Individual residential complexes of the Cooperative together with their immediate surroundings, dubbed as colonies, were created by an architect or a team of architects. A colony comprised of one or a few buildings with balconies and staircases overlooking the indispensable inner courtyard. By September 1939 nine colonies housed five thousand residents.

The estate architects included two husband-and-wife duos, Helena and Szymon Syrkus, and Barbara and Stanisław Brukalski, who aspired to meet the prerequisites of healthful housing conditions by means of adjusting the size of individual apartments, providing sanitation facilities, creating appropriate building separation to admit enough direct sunlight, and supplying recreational areas with vegetation. The staircases and balconies were situated on the courtyard side of the estate with no motor vehicles allowed, thus creating an inner space to cultivate social cohesion among the vegetation of the flower beds and a network of paved footpaths around them. Focal to both function and design, the estate’s greenspace became a significant part of the residents’ living.   

The Warsaw Housing Cooperative in the Żoliborz district was conceived as an integral part of the urban layout of the New Żoliborz district with its avenues radially stretching to Wilson Square, and the green network of other hubs of urban vegetation emerging at the time, Romuald Traugutt Park and Stefan Żeromski Park.

“Keeping It Green Together”

The residents looked after the greenspace laid out by the designers. The colony buildings encompassed the enclosed yet spacious courtyards evocative of collective farming or communal gardens. They reimagined the social opportunities of rest and recreation. 

“Every courtyard contains sand pits for the youngest, and playgrounds for the older children. The remaining part of the courtyard is grass-covered, laced only with footpaths lined with ornamental trees giving the impression of park alleys. ‘Plants appreciate your care, especially from children’ read the lawn signs replacing the dull prohibitive ‘Keep off the grass’ omnipresent in other estates” (Warszawska Spółdzielnia, 1938). Colonies nos. 3 and 4 also included resident-run vegetable gardens. The board consistently supported community greening, while the residents donated a few hundred zloty annually toward the maintenance of flower beds, trees, and shrubs in the courtyards (Toniak, 2020). Surviving photographs from the 1928 Planting Festival demonstrate the residents’ efforts to sustain the communal green spaces. 

The estate was also home to the Cooperative Gardening Center established in 1936 designated “to maintain the courtyards, as well as run the school garden, a flower garden, and a greenhouse. The Center offers gardening advice and admits sick plants for ‘treatment’. Very popular among the residents, the Center successfully inspires them to create indoor flower gardens” (Warszawska Spółdzielnia, 1938).

Whether it is on a larger scale of an estate or colony, or on a smaller private scale at home, green space engagement encourages positive interactions that cultivate social cohesion.

On Allotment Gardens, or “My Own Skaryszew Park, My Own Royal Baths”

Allotment gardens are quintessentially urban. Early twentieth-century municipalization and enfranchisement of city grounds enabled allotments to emerge on a larger scale, which in turn generated a shift from the former practice of leasing gardening plots to modern allotment gardening. 

Research studies indicate that the allotment gardens movement in Poland occurred not because of any particular passion for gardening, but instead it is said to have developed as a social response to issues triggered by industrialization such as insufficient exposure to nature, overcrowding, and related social complications (Gryniewicz-Balińska, 2014). 

At the onset of the twentieth century and in the interwar period, the proponents of urban allotment gardens advocated therapeutic properties and social values imbuing this way of  cultivating green spaces. They attributed significance to the health benefits of outdoor activities and championed gardening as a pastime. The press commended allotment gardens for becoming the owners’ personal slice of urban greening; their own Skaryszew Park or Royal Baths. Maintaining a garden plot was seen as prompting important educational benefit of shaping socially desirable features. It instilled diligence, consistency, and responsibility. Researchers also argued that it helped prevent substance abuse and social decline. In 1909 Edmund Jankowski wrote that the motivation behind allotment gardening is the desire “to give the working class an opportunity to enjoy not just the outdoors, but also the experience of ownership; to improve the health of their families, facilitate the upbringing of their children outside the stuffy overcrowded homes or unkempt yards, commonly the school of vices, but in better conditions” (Jankowski, 1909, pp. 5-6). In a 1937 piece published in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the National Union of Allotment Gardens and Housing Estates Societies, Władysław Lubawy argued that allotments play an important social role in providing “the urban residents with a plot of land for a little peace and quiet, and a place to cultivate home grown produce for the benefit of your family” (Lubawy, 1937, p. 3) . For a family, maintaining a piece of land embodied an experience that promoted a strengthening of their bonds. For larger groups of working class allotmenteers, it brought like-minded people together to build a community of common interests and activities. 

Garden Communality

Regardless of the reasons behind conceiving allotment gardens, they became increasingly more popular and received support from the Warsaw City Council and social organizations. In 1927 the Allotment Gardens Society was established in the capital. 

Inspired by Kazimiera Proczek and initially named after her, the first allotment garden, dubbed a working-class allotment, emerged on Odyńca Street in Warsaw in 1902. Originally, the plots at Odyńca belonged mostly to the families of Warsaw tram drivers, so the area became known as the Tram Drivers’ Allotment Garden. It exists to this day having received legal status in 1907 as the Allotments Society. 

Surviving to this day, the second allotment garden in Warsaw was the Rakowiec Workers’ Allotment Garden. In 1927, the city acquired a part of the subdivided Rakowiec manor farm. The land was transferred to the Allotments Society and divided into 150 plots, fenced off and with access to water . The Rakowiec Garden became a component of the green wedge funneling fresh air into the city. Members of the Rakowiec Garden established an organizational committee to approve gazebo designs or fences for the plots, as well as a childcare committee to organize outdoor activities for the members’ kids. The allotmenteers also made sure that the common area received a tool shed, showers and a soccer pitch. 

In 1939, Warsaw and its outskirts had over 50 allotment gardens covering over 260 hectares. Significantly, this considerable part of the urban green space was collectively created by the residents of the city. 

Allotment gardens offered much more than opportunities to unwind from the challenges of urban living by nurturing plants. To this day, they play important social roles of cultivating social cohesion and positive civic attitudes. The allotment movement is still quite successful despite the social and political shifts. Drawing on experience of past generations, Varsovians still tend their small urban plots.

The workers’ allotment garden emerged from the same idea as children’s gardens. Both revolved around the educational impact of involvement with nature.

Green experience for the youngest

A garden for children stemmed from Friedrich Fröbel’s educational concept reflecting his belief that experiencing nature through walking, playing with simple natural materials, and outdoor activity should form the foundation of early childhood education. Fröbel coined the word and opened the first kindergarten in 1937 in Blankenburg. Educational establishments founded  according to Fröbel’s ideas offered an alternative to the Prussian Education System. Fröbel conceived education as a garden, the teacher and caretaker as the gardener nurturing the children as tender plants. The concept of a children’s garden spread across countries modifying its objectives. Most frequently, educators’ focus revolved around movement-based activities for children. Such was the case of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association established in 1882 in London. Warsaw followed suit. 

In 1897 Przegląd Pedagogiczny [Pedagogical Review] published “Zabawy dziecięce na placach miejskich” [Children’s games in city squares] by Władysław Kozłowski. The author propounded the idea of creating gardens for children. He argued for the need to organize common outdoor movement-based activities for children. In May 1899 engineer Tadeusz Balicki spoke at a Warsaw Hygiene Association meeting. His initiative was to create a “children’s garden” in Warsaw. Rapid urbanization had resulted in poor sanitation. Young Varsovians had but mostly filthy and cramped backyards for their outdoor playtime. The meeting minutes state that “the disastrous impact of the young evolving among the metropolitan filth and decay urge the necessity to create playgrounds for low-income children in order to distract them from their usual abhorrent living conditions” (Sprawozdanie, 1899, p. 104).

Rau’s Gardens 

The Association took the initiative and before long established the Committee for Children’s Play. The Committee pitched the idea to create a children’s garden to the Mayor of Warsaw and received his approval. Unexpectedly yet quite fortunately, the necessary funds arrived from the heirs of Warsaw entrepreneur Wilhelm Ellis Rau. In early August, the youngest residents were able to enjoy the first children’s garden near today’s Plac Na Rozdrożu (“Agrykola”), and by the end of the month they could also enjoy the second one located in the Saxon Garden (“Saski”). In 1904 there were 12 gardens in place including the grounds by Agrykola Street (“Pod Sobieskim”), behind St. Florian's Cathedral in the Praga district, by Górczewska Street in the Wola district, by Kościelna Street, and in the New Town square. Known as Rau’s Gardens, they commemorate the donors. 

As far as kids’ classes were concerned, Warsaw’s Rau’s Gardens drew on German ideas. However, the layout resembled the concept of Cracow physician Henryk Jordan. In both Cracow and Warsaw, the space was open to all children as long as they signed up and were not part of organized groups such as a school group. Unlike Cracow, Warsaw allowed co-educational play. The Warsaw gardens were separate units initially running only instructor-led two-hour classes and later also allowing unstructured play. With growing infrastructure, the gardens engaged 2000 children daily with 80% of all kids coming from poor families. The facilities would close for the winter. 

The Cracow Model, or Jordan Park

After 1918 Rau’s Gardens declined in popularity while a new form of children’s gardens caught on. Cracow physician Henryk Jordan was the eponymous founder of Jordan Park. In June 1929 the Mayor of Warsaw Zygmunt Słomiński opened Raj, or Polish for Paradise, the first Jordan Park in Warsaw at 2 Bagatela Street. Other districts sought to create similar facilities. The Warsaw Society for Jordan Parks chaired by Jadwiga Jędrzejowiczowa was founded in 1933, and the Central Society for Jordan Parks was created a year later. By the second half of the 1930s eight Parks had been activated: 2-4 Bagatela Street, 88 Hoża Street, 3 Wawelska Street, Opaczewska Street, Wybrzeże Kościuszkowskie Street in the Powiśle neighborhood, 6 Ludwiki Street in the Wola district, in the Żoliborz district (“near the workers’ housing estate”), and 55 Wileńska Street in the Praga district. Each park was different and adjusted to local needs. 

Whether the idea of a children’s garden took the shape of Rau’s gardens or Jordan parks, it broke with the nineteenth-century tradition of passive leisure unfolding in public parks where adults could walk, and children should neither be seen nor heard. Young people became actively engaged with public space.  

Author: Lena Wicherkiewicz

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