The Rampa and the ski-jump

Curious as to what had happened at the rampa na kruszywa on ul. Karczunkowska over the summer, I strolled over with my trusty Nikon D80 with 18-200mm lens. To my surprise, the rest of the embankment had been dismantled, and all that was left was the loading ramp itself, isolated on the Mazovian plain, looking like a cross between a beached landing craft and a pontoon bridge from nowhere to nowhere.

Note the sandy nature of the soil south of Warsaw, and the thousands of tyres on the site still awaiting removal. I wonder what the scrap value of an old tyre is.

Will the rampa be dismantled? Well, it occupies what's fast becoming prime development land, and there must be hundreds of tons of scrap metal up there, but then again Warsaw has even more bizarre examples of redundant architecture just standing there for decades.

Take for example the ski-jump in Mokotów (below), which I visited in the afternoon. Built in 1953, it was closed forever in 1989, a chunk removed from the top to prevent unauthorised jumps. So for nearly 20 years, this prime piece of development land has just stood here, useless.

I guess residents of the area (Pod skocznią - 'Under the ski-jump') consider it a local landmark, but its very existance is testament to Poland's very mixed up approach to urban planning and development. Next weekend, weather permitting, I hope to visit another useless leftover structure, the 13km of motorway near Bolimów that was to have been part of the Berlin to Moscow route built in time for the Moscow Olympics in 1980. All that happened was that a two-lane motorway appeared in the middle of nowhere, a lost highway with unfinished viaducts spanning country streams, now overgrown with grass, bushes and trees.

This time last year:
Spiders' webs and sunshine
Week before equinox