Stalowa Street and the Konopacki Palace

The stone house at the corner of Strzelecka Street and Srednia Street was built for tenants, not as a family residence. The windows of its formal façade are grouped into arches, its balconies are cast in iron, and this finery gave the house the nickname “palace.” Inside, apartments of from three to ten rooms were rented out, with a shared laundry room, clothes mangle, and bathroom; after restoration, Dom Kultury Praga operates here.

Ksawery Konopacki began Nowa Praga with a failure: he put plots on the sandy outskirts of Warsaw up for sale, but no buyers came forward. He was an official in the mining department and wanted to make money from land beside the Warsaw–Saint Petersburg Railway, then under construction. In eighteen sixty, Konopacki finalized the purchase of a plot from the former Targówek farmstead, and soon afterward left government service at his own request. His savings and the money of his wife, Laura Maria, went into the venture.

Other landowners preferred to live on the left bank and wait for plots to rise in price. Konopacki settled amid his own sandy land. His first wooden house stood at the site of the present-day address, Stalowa Street, twenty-one. There he gathered people with whom he discussed the layout of the future settlement. Surveyor Józef Sikorski divided the property into one hundred plots and laid out the streets. The main one was named Srednia Street, while present-day Stalowa Street was called Nowopragska Street. Konopacki offered favorable terms to buyers of modest means. At his own expense, he set up a bakery selling inexpensive bread.

Five years later, newspapers counted one hundred seventy-five houses, shops, schools, workshops, and small factories in Nowa Praga. Konopacki earned an income from land that had previously been considered unsuitable for development. The settlement also came to be called Konopaczyzna, after the surname of the man who divided it into plots.

At the same time, Konopacki built a large stone house at the corner of Strzelecka Street and Srednia Street. He borrowed part of the construction money from Laura Maria. Its formal façade, with arched windows and cast-iron balconies, gave the building the nickname “palace,” though behind it stood a tenement house. Advertisements offered apartments of from three to ten rooms; residents had use of a shared laundry room, clothes mangle, and bathroom. Konopacki was building here not a family residence, but a model of the development he wanted to attract to his new district.

The name Stalowa appeared later. In eighteen seventy-eight, the owners of several industrial enterprises pooled their capital and built the Warsaw Steelworks at the eastern end of the street. They chose a site near the tracks of the Warsaw–Saint Petersburg Railway: the factory produced mainly rails and railcar parts. Nowopragska Street first came to be called Fabryczna Street.

Production lasted about ten years. After high duties were introduced on imported pig iron, the owners decided to move the equipment and workers to Yekaterinoslav—the name then used for present-day Dnipro. Artillery workshops were installed in the empty buildings. The street received the name “Stalowa,” Polish for “Steel,” in eighteen ninety-one, when steel was no longer being smelted here.

The wooden house where Konopacki gathered the settlement's first organizers is gone. The stone tenement house survived and, after restoration, became Dom Kultury Praga. Konopacki's name remains on the façade, and the street signs preserve the memory of the factory that operated here for only a decade.