Gdańsk conservator moves to expropriate the port workers’ Maritime Culture House in Nowy Port

Years of ignored orders

The building's perpetual usufructuary since 2006 has been Central Fund Of Immovables, a property company based in Łódź. According to the conservator, the owner is unable to care for the monument properly and its condition continues to deteriorate. Since 2022 the conservator's office has inspected the building several times and ordered the owner to secure the roof, repair the gutters, remove damp plaster, treat the walls for fungus and replaster where necessary. A formal warning followed in July 2023, then a fine. In summer 2024, after the fine was imposed, the owner applied for and received a permit for the works, yet no repairs were carried out, not even basic protective measures. The most urgent threat is to the interiors, which are at risk from a leaking roof.

Expropriation is the strongest tool Polish heritage law offers when a listed building faces destruction and its owner fails to act, and it is used rarely. In this case, the conservator sees no alternative.

- If the building remains in the hands of its current owner, it will undoubtedly be completely destroyed and degraded - the conservator states in the justification of the application.

A culture palace for the port

The Maritime Culture House opened on 7 November 1954. Designed by architect Witold Rakowski, the socialist realist building was at the planning stage meant to echo Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science, and formed part of an ambitious scheme to build a new city centre for Gdańsk in Nowy Port, replacing the war-ravaged historic core. The wider plan was abandoned after 1956, but the culture house was completed.

The building belonged to the Port of Gdańsk, and port workers and their families were its main audience. It housed a theatre, a cinema, a café and a reading room, and hosted language courses, music and dance events, as well as photography, ship modelling and dance classes for children. In 1958 it staged the first premiere of the Musical Theatre, which moved to Gdynia two years later. The port authority sold the building in the 1990s, ending its original role.

A community that never gave up

Residents of Nowy Port have been fighting for the building for more than three decades. In 1992 they founded the Maritime Culture House Society to restore its cultural role, and it was thanks to the society's efforts that the building was entered in the register of monuments in 2012. The listing decision ranked it among the most important examples of architecture built on the Polish coast after 1945, and the building was protected in its entirety, as much of its original interior has survived.

The Nowy Port District Council has welcomed the conservator's move. The decision now lies with the City of Gdańsk, which will conduct the expropriation proceedings. After years of orders that never turned into repairs, the case is for the first time heading in a direction that gives one of Gdańsk's most distinctive post-war buildings a genuine chance of survival.