The Prudential: Warsaw's Skyscraper and the Two-Tonne Shell
Why is it significant?
Stand on Plac Powstańców Warszawy, Warsaw Insurgents Square, and look up at the tall, slim tower on its corner. Today it is a hotel.
Key Facts
| Place | The Prudential: Warsaw's Skyscraper and the Two-Tonne Shell |
|---|---|
| Address | Plac Powstańców Warszawy 9, 00-039 Warszawa, Poland |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.23570, 21.01230 |
| Part of Walk | Sixty-Three Days: The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, from Krasiński Square to Złota Street |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on Plac Powstańców Warszawy, Warsaw Insurgents Square, and look up at the tall, slim tower on its corner. Today it is a hotel. In the 1930s it was the Prudential building, the Warsaw headquarters of a British insurance company, and with about sixty-six metres it was the tallest building in Poland and one of the tallest in Europe. Its steel frame, designed by the architect Marcin Weinfeld, was the height of modernity.
That frame is the hero of this stop. On 28 August 1944 a shell weighing around two tonnes, fired by one of the gigantic German siege mortars brought in to crush the Uprising, struck the tower. A young photographer, Sylwester Braun, whose underground name was Kris, caught the instant of impact: a white plume bursting out of the side of the building. It became one of the defining images of the Uprising. And the tower? Gutted and burned, its steel skeleton stood.
Braun was one of several insurgent photographers and reporters who documented the fighting day by day. Many of his negatives survived the war, and much of what the world knows visually about those sixty-three days comes from cameras like his. Before the war this square was called Plac Napoleona; it took its present name, in honour of the insurgents, after the war.
Central Warsaw was not one battlefield but a patchwork. Insurgent-held districts were cut off from each other by German strongpoints, and couriers, often teenagers, carried messages between them through cellars, ruins and sewers. This part of the centre stayed in Polish hands until the surrender in October, under almost constant shelling.
After 1945 the Prudential was rebuilt as the Hotel Warszawa, with a heavy socialist-realist face, as if the city wanted to forget the elegant tower of the thirties. In recent years it was renovated and reopened as a hotel again, with the frame that took that shell still inside. Now walk west along Świętokrzyska to Zielna street, where a dark, heavy building with a tall tower stands on the corner.