Built at the height of the Industrial Revolution to house workers employed at the Hirschmann, Kijewski and Scholtze chemical factory, the trio of bungalow-style properties today form a living link to a past long forgotten.
Justifying his decision, Marcin Dawidowicz, the Mazovian Provincial Conservator of Monuments, wrote: “The buildings included in the entry constitute the last evidence of the Targówek Fabryczny area of the urban concept of ‘patronage estates’ implemented at the end of the 19th century.”
These so-called ‘patronage estates’ were once a common feature on the industrial landscape and provided housing for workers and their families; in the process, thriving communities were created. Though this left residents indelibly bonded to their workplace, this was seen as a far preferable solution than living in slums.
Informally known as Siarczanki – due to their location on Siarczana street – the handful of residential buildings now inscribed in the register were also praised by Dawidowicz for their architectural style.
“They are an example of architecturally coherent group of buildings that stand in a historically established functional and spatial relationship to each other,” he wrote.
“Moreover, they constitute an important source of knowledge about the history of wooden residential construction that served as an auxiliary and complementary function for the factory complex,” added Dawidowicz.
Originally, the factory was inside a former monastery on Solec street on the left bank of Warsaw. Co-founded in 1822 by a German entrepreneur and a Polish landowner, it became known as one of the first chemical plants in the region – as such, business thrived.
In the background, not all was well. In 1849, for instance, it's known that 1,504 zlotys (approximately 5% of the firm’s annual labor costs) were spent treating workers that had been injured by the chemicals being produced. As the decades advanced, concerns were also raised by the toxic fumes that belched from the plant.
After the factory’s license was terminated due to mounting unease about its sanitary condition, the firm upped sticks to move to Warsaw’s other side in the 1890s. Building new facilities, this modern factory was complemented by a villa for the director, as well as a brick tenement and six wooden bungalows surrounded for more rank-and-file employees.
After enjoying a prolonged period of success, the plant’s bubble burst with the onset of The Great Depression in the inter-war years – in 1938, the firm was placed in liquidation.
Bombed in 1939, the factory was fleetingly used by the Germans during the Nazi occupation, before being obliterated towards the end of the war. As if to underscore the permanence of the factory’s disappearance from the map, in 1945 three of the wooden bungalows were then dismantled.
While the director’s villa has enjoyed protected status since 1983, the induction into the Register of Monuments of the surviving wooden bungalows has been welcomed as overdue recognition of their historic value.
