Plac Rozjezdny, Wrocław

Plac Rozjezdny is an irregular square in Wrocław’s Świdnickie Suburb, shaped by the railway embankment beside it. Established in the early eighteen eighties on former Gajowice fields, it once stood beside a six-thousand-seat circus with stables for one hundred horses. The nearby elevated railway dates from eighteen ninety-six to nineteen oh one.

Plac Rozjezdny is the oddly shaped square gathered between the railway, Kolejowa Street, Jęczmienna Street and Pszennna Street in Świdnickie Suburb. Its layout follows the elevated railway and the embankment beside it, rather than any neat urban grid. The square was laid out in eighteen eighty-one and eighteen eighty-two on land that had previously been fields belonging to Gajowice.

Its original design paired two triangles: one was a planted public space, the other a building plot, later lined with nineteenth-century rental houses. The railway is the force that gives this place its peculiar geometry. The elevated line approaching from Wrocław Główny was built between eighteen ninety-six and nineteen oh one, then continues here on an earth embankment.

Beneath and beside those tracks, this small patch of town once held an astonishing entertainment venue: E. Renz’s circus opened here in eighteen seventy-seven, became Busch’s circus a year later, and could accommodate six thousand spectators. Its rear stables held one hundred horses. The circus building was destroyed in nineteen forty-five, but the rail-bound shape of Plac Rozjezdny still preserves the outline of its unusual past.