Liberty Square (Plac Wolności), Łódź

This octagonal square at the northern end of Piotrkowska Street is the point from which Łódź numbers its buildings, and the place where the industrial city began. It was laid out in 1823 as the marketplace of a new cloth-makers' settlement, and today it is framed by a Neoclassical town hall, a domed church and the Kościuszko monument. Since a redesign completed in 2024, half of the square belongs to pedestrians, and beneath it you can visit a museum inside a former sewer reservoir.

History: the New Town market

The square was designed when the authorities of the Kingdom of Poland, led by Rajmund Rembieliński, were turning Łódź into a centre of the textile industry. It was given the shape of a regular octagon at the crossing of the Piotrków road with today's Legionów and Pomorska streets, and a grid of streets was laid out around it — some still bear the names West, East and North Street (Zachodnia, Wschodnia, Północna). To distinguish it from the old marketplace about 450 m to the north, it was called the New Town Market. In 1827–1828 the town hall and the Protestant Holy Trinity Church were built here — the city's first prestigious buildings.

A market operated in the middle of the square until 1898, when trams arrived and the marketplace became a formal square. Its present name was given in 1918, after Poland regained independence. During the German occupation it was renamed Freiheitsplatz and then Deutschlandplatz.

The monument and surrounding buildings

• Tadeusz Kościuszko Monument — a 17-metre memorial unveiled on 14 December 1930. The occupiers demolished it on 11 November 1939, and in 1960 it was rebuilt in identical form.
• Town Hall of 1827 — a Neoclassical building now housing the State Archives.
• Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit — a former Protestant church; the present domed building dates from 1889–1891.
• Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum in a former school building from 1857.
• Pharmacy Museum on the site of the city's first pharmacy.

Interesting facts

Beneath the square lies the "Dętka" Sewer Museum — a branch of the Museum of the City of Łódź inside a reservoir built in 1926 to a design by William Heerlein Lindley. Shaped roughly like an inner tube (dętka in Polish), it is 142 m long and 187 cm high and held 300 m³ of water used to flush the sewers. Since 2015 the square has been part of the Historic Monument "Łódź – multicultural landscape of an industrial city". The redesign of 2022–2024 moved the trams to the northern side, removed the roundabout traffic around the monument and added greenery and a playground.

Tripto tip

Liberty Square is the best starting point for a walk along Piotrkowska: the promenade and the rest of the street run 4.2 km south from here to Independence Square (Plac Niepodległości). The square itself, with the monument and façades, takes 20–30 minutes; allow an hour with "Dętka" — check opening hours and entry rules in advance on the Museum of the City of Łódź website. After walking down Piotrkowska, you can come back by tram, which stops at the square.