Arriving at Kielce station (now renamed 'Kielce Główny'), cross under the tracks and head east into the city centre, as I did in February this year, and things look promising. The station is undergoing a thorough remont, the city centre is improving greatly. But go west under the tracks, and life as it was before 1989 seems to go on, though having degraded and decayed over the intervening decades. Below: ulica R. Mielczarskiego looking as decrepit as Warsaw's Służewiec Przemysłowy did in the 1990s.
Below: don't look up. Keep looking down unless you want a shoe-full of puddle water, or an ankle twisted on the perpetually uneven surfaces. And from the station to the trade fair, Targi Kielce, it's a five kilometre walk. And every step of the way with cracked, inadequate paving.
Under leaden skies, in on-off rain, the western industrial fringes of Kielce take on a depressing air of how things once were across Poland.
Below: ulica Średnia (lit. 'average street' or 'middling street')
Below: don't steal our coal! Behind barbed wire, heaps of coal piled up by the railway station of Kielce Herbskie, along ul. Oskara Kolberga (1814-1890, ethnographer, folklorist, and composer - after whom my train back to Warsaw was also named).
Below: under-invested bus stop. Again, I can just about remember such scenes in Warsaw in the late 1990s.
Below: ul. Hoża; pre-war and post-war architectural styles. At least here the pedestrian crossing has been properly modernised.
Below: back at Kielce Główny station, four local trains standing by the old platforms; to the left of frame the new station building and the modernised platform 1, with works approaching completion.
Given the importance to the importance to the local - and indeed national - economy of Targi Kielce exhibition and conference centre, the city authorities could have done a lot more to make the route there from the station easier on the eye and on the feet.
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4 comments:
The block of flats in the background on the first pic is Młoda 4 - gained notoriety across the whole Poland as the worst place to live in this country. worth googling a bit about the history of the venue.
@ student SGH
WOW! Just looed it up. That's amazing, to have caught something like that in my lens without even having been aware of it. But the view from the top, taking in the Góry Świętokrzyskie hills - looks really good.
The city West of the tracks does look more raw and unpolished looking at Google Earth. I wonder why that is, It's not like the West side is more isolated in general.
@ Anonymous
My guess is that the west side was developed to be industrial, I passed several sites along the way to Targi Kielce, some still working, others quite dilapidated. The railway's arrival in Kielce in 1885 would have led to the demarcation of city into some form of early zoning, I'd say.
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