Skwer Pionierów Wrocławskich, Wrocław

Skwer Pionierów Wrocławskich is the small square named for Wrocław’s pioneers, at the meeting of Jedności Narodowej and Józefa Poniatowskiego streets in Nadodrze. Its present open shape has an unexpectedly watery beginning. In eighteen eighty-eight, builders laid out this space only after filling in part of an old river channel: a vanished side arm of the Oder.

The plan, designed the year before by the entrepreneurs A. Rappsilber and G. von Drabizius, made a triangle with a planted square at its centre. By the end of the eighteen nineties, tenement houses had enclosed the surrounding plots. Much of that setting changed during the war: some of the buildings were destroyed, and the central green square itself disappeared after nineteen forty-five.

Notice the compact old public toilet building that survives here. Dating from about nineteen hundred, it follows a standard design produced in the office of Karl Klimm, Wrocław’s city architect from eighteen ninety-two until nineteen twenty-four. The place once carried the German name Waterlooplatz; its current official Polish name has been in force since the twenty-fourth of March nineteen forty-eight. In the first postwar years, people also used the unofficial names Waterloo Square and Jena Square.