Ząbkowska Street
Why is it significant?
Feel the cobbles underfoot and look along the street: rows of tenements with iron balconies, faded inscriptions, dark gateways and, here and there, a freshly painted facade between two that have not been touched for decades. This is Ząbkowska, the most photographed street in Praga.
Key Facts
| Place | Ząbkowska Street |
|---|---|
| Address | ul. Ząbkowska 20, 03-736 Warszawa, Poland |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.25370, 21.04180 |
| Part of Walk | Warsaw's Right Bank: Praga's Bears, Bazaars, Vodka and Backyard Shrines |
| Generated | Generated |
Feel the cobbles underfoot and look along the street: rows of tenements with iron balconies, faded inscriptions, dark gateways and, here and there, a freshly painted facade between two that have not been touched for decades. This is Ząbkowska, the most photographed street in Praga.
Its name is simple: this was the road to Ząbki, a village to the north-east, and it became one of Praga's main streets as the district grew in the nineteenth century. Before the war it was full of small shops, workshops and bars, Polish and Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox, with people living above the shop and trading below it. It had its own soundtrack and its own language, the Praga dialect, in which a sharp-witted local operator was a cwaniak and every corner had a nickname.
Imagine it on a pre-war summer evening. Into a courtyard comes a kapela podwórkowa, a courtyard band: an accordion, a banjo, a fiddle, maybe a drum. They play the Warsaw street ballads everybody knows, songs about the river, the market and unhappy love. And from the windows above, residents throw down a few coins wrapped in a twist of paper, so they will not roll away or hit anybody on the head.
The street survived the war, but not prosperity. For decades after 1945 its tenements were neglected, and Ząbkowska became a byword for poverty. Then, from the 2000s, artists, bars and clubs moved in, and the street became the symbol of the new Praga. Even now, an old man in a flat cap and a young designer with a laptop may share the same doorway.
Look up at the walls between the windows. On some of them you can still spot the scars of bullets and shrapnel, small pits in the brick, from September 1944. Nobody plastered them over. Now carry on east along Ząbkowska, until the red-brick walls of a great old factory appear on your left.