At first glance, in the interwar period in the new Polish nation state Lviv had to solve almost the same problems as in previous decades. However, the overall context changed substantially, creating entirely new conditions. In the Second Polish Republic, Lviv, relegated to the margins of economic and cultural life, tried to protect its status of a "modern urban center." The same can be said of private enterprise. Some important developments in the process of modernization of Lviv also should be noted. After the First World War modernization strategies, used by the advanced Western world, got firmly established and provided extensive scientific and functional approaches which sought to embrace the city in general. These trends could not pass over Lviv, but here, on the outskirts of Central and Eastern Europe, they were certainly implemented in a little different way. Figuratively speaking, Lviv had not managed to fully pass the previous course of "steam" modernization, when the circumstances demanded already further, more systematic actions. The situation was not very good for Pidzamche. Before the First World War, this was an industrial area, which was important in the contemporary city limits and could still expect a gradual improvement and development as well as the recognition of its important key position in the structure of the city. Moreover, Pidzamche could claim the recognition of its fundamentally modern and progressive character, gain a higher status and more attention on the part of the local authorities than before. In the new post-war situation, the perception of the city by the authorities moved to another level and was determined by new senses. There was a leap from the progressive developing and "refining" the city "from the center" to the "care" of the whole city at once and, moreover, within its extended limits. Thus, during the interwar years Pidzamche as "industrial outskirts" generally received a smaller portion of "civilizing" attention on the part of the city than at the turn of the twentieth century. The working district found itself in an intermediate "grey zone" of the general conditions of urban development: between ensuring the minimum standards of "civilization" in the whole city and concerns over the incorporation of the suburban villages. After all, these two horizons of development should have converged in Pidzamche, but, as it turned out after the war, the district's industrial "specialization," which played a major role in the development of Lviv in general, in some way hindered the local development at the same time.
From Pidzamche's perspective, the establishment of the Soviet regime did not bring any radical changes in its material landscape, as could be expected. Soviet officials were guided by the same general categories of "care" and "large scale" as Polish ones and, quite naturally, with even greater enthusiasm. So it was decided not to touch the "birthmark" of early and "steam" modernization in some special way, since it was too important for the city, and, anyway, there were not enough resources for a radical transformation of the densely housed neighborhoods, which were still not the most important ones. The Soviet socialism's space is, obviously, not only new model neighborhoods or wide squares, but a powerful penetration of the corresponding ideology in all spheres of life as well. In this sense, Pidzamche was reformatted almost completely. In the first post-war decade the effect of the ideological and symbolic "Sovietization" was amplified due to the violent blocking of communication channels between those who remembered or knew old Polish-Austrian Lviv and those who had no such experience or information. However, while for many other Lviv residents "Soviet Lviv" meant new convenient apartments, wide boulevards, and modern transport, it was, in fact, only "communist labor" that remained for the residents of Pidzamche. We can assume that the "Sovietization" of social, working and personal relations also had many modern features and greatly changed the nature of the local social space, but it is necessary to confirm this opinion by a more detailed study.
In this way, Pidzamche finally became a hostage and symptom of the "pursuing" "under-modernization" of Lviv, in whose process an essentially modern district was formed, but there were not enough resources for its consistent regulation.Under Municipal "Care"
The processes of European cities development, typical of the nineteenth century, did not stop in the interwar period. After the First World War one more point was added to the major challenges of urbanization — that of a post-war reconstruction. However, with the gradual bringing of cities in order, the intensive urbanization model, proper to the turn of the century, was relatively quick to return (Bairoch, 1988, 302-303). The war, in its special way, even stimulated these processes, causing large-scale migratory movements and inserting innovative elements in the usual practices of architects, engineers, and officials.
It was the municipal authorities that became the main subject of urban transformation in Europe after the First World War. A considerable tendency to limit the spontaneous activity of developers, either private firms or individuals, was delineated in the late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries. By the 1920s some of the metropolises, such as London, Berlin or Paris, had accumulated a great positive experience of systematic urban planning on the part of local authorities. Their example was gradually taken over by other European cities. It was suffrage democratization that played an important role in increasing the municipal authorities' attention to the issues of the city organization. Although in the early twentieth century access to the municipal elections was still limited by certain property and tax qualifications, the internal stratification of voters disappeared. That is why support from the citizens of the average level of prosperity became increasingly important for the authorities. This circumstance forced the city officials to expand the list of their responsibilities (see Бонусяк, 2000, 84; Lees, 2014).
Interwar Poland consisted of territories which previously were part of different state formations — German, Russian, and Habsburg Empires. Accordingly, there were, officially, three independent systems of urban self-government in the country till the early 1930s. Lviv, like Cracow, represented the tradition and experience of city life inherent in the Austrian provinces. The functioning of the city was determined by a special statute or charter, which remained in force in independent Poland until 1933. However, after the war the formal validity of the statute was limited by some amendments giving primacy to the central government. The magistrate's structure and duties were continually changed. In general, the changes were directed, on the one hand, at improving the functionality in new post-war conditions and, on the other hand, at limiting the city authorities in favor of the central government. In March of 1933, after the law on partial change of local self-government structure was adopted, Lviv nearly lost its "special" status, and the main task of the city mayor was the implementation of directives from the center. It was purely practical questions of organization and structure which remained in the jurisdiction of the magistrate. The State also transferred to the city many of the so-called "commissioned" issues, i.e. tax collection, postal service, legal procedure, recruiting soldiers, etc., which the magistrate had to carry out on its own expense. Accordingly, very little resources were left for purely city needs. This was especially true of the areas of education, social care or health care, which were a heavy burden on the city budget (Klimek, 2006, 23-25).
In the mid-1920s Lviv managed to restore a more or less normal city life. However, some problems remained which were inherited from the rapid pre-war development. The negative impact of the war manifested itself not only in direct material losses and destruction of existing infrastructure, but also in the fact that the solution of important urgent issues of the city proper regulation, which had become actual before the war, was delayed for several decades. Problems concerning housing, city infrastructure, connecting houses to the water and electricity supply systems were first on the list of priorities.
Compared to other Polish cities, which had similar difficulties, Lviv had a specially acute problem of small apartments caused by the predominance of small houses and one- and two-room apartments in the city. Many Lviv residents, 7.6% of the population as of 1921, lived in basements or in attics (Бонусяк, 2000, 235). In the suburbs the urban poor usually lived in dugouts and barracks. Destitute workers often had to live in the premises of factories or plants where they worked. This was accompanied by very high prices of buying and leasing houses, all because of high demand. It was quite usual that rooms owned by poor families were rented by still poorer tenants (Makarczuk, 240). An intense flow of workers from nearby villages and towns far exceeded the slow growth rate of housing construction, which was outlined after 1926 and lasted until the great crisis of the early 1930s. The city authorities tried to extend their care to the poorest by building barracks for the homeless and those without shelter. In particular, in the late 1920s a few blocks of barracks were built on vul. Poltvyana (ul. Pełtewna) and Dzherelna (ul. Źródlana, at the former location of the city slaughterhouse).
The low-income citizens were also helped by public committees and associations. A typical case is the list of the unemployed, attempted to be made by a committee formed at the church of St. Martin in Pidzamche. The registration of those who needed help had to be stopped soon, as the committee was addressed by much more people than expected (Makarczuk, 239).
In 1936 the scope of construction (primarily residential) finally reached and exceeded the 1913 figures (Bohdanova, 2004, 171). This was due to the presence of new areas in the southern part of the city and a special preferential program for municipal and family housing. So, many new buildings were either elite villas or affordable social apartments. Actually, the last (but not too large) category of new buildings prevailed in Pidzamche in the 1920s-1930s. Thus, at the beginning of vul. Donetska, there are two residential municipal buildings built in the mid-1920s. The four-storied one was for the city municipal service workers, the three-storied one was meant for workers of urban enterprises and institutions. More often, however, the authorities resorted not to the construction of new homes, but to the completion or restructuring of old buildings, like the house on vul. Lemkivska, 24.
Among the important problems of the city in the postwar years, there were infectious diseases and poor sanitary conditions of the urban environment. Various epidemics, typical of war, were overcome in 1920-1923. In general, however, the situation remained alarming, as in other cities which survived the war. The municipal authorities did not have sufficient resources to carry out necessary large-scale structural changes in their policy and system actions. Nevertheless, the northern district, as the most dangerous in terms of sanitary, attracted increased attention. As early as 1919 in a house on vul. Henerala Hrekova an epidemiological hospital was arranged, and the so-called "peoples' baths" functioned on pl. Misionerów (now, probably vul. Detka) and ul. Balonowa (now vul. Haidamatska), where the services were provided free of charge or at very low prices (Lwów na granicy ...,1934, 43).
In the 1920s the problem of pre-municipal villages appeared to be particularly acute. Being de facto an integral part of Lviv, they did not formally fall under the authority of the city, which limited the proper control and regulation of the territory. First of all, it concerned the northern and western suburban communes, which had already lost their previous rustic look and turned into working-class districts with the highest population density of all neighbourhoods and a dense, almost urban housing. Due to low prices for land a large number of businesses, shops, and taverns were concentrated there. On the one hand, the northern suburbs could be considered a useful resource as Zamarstyniv, Klepariv, Pidzamche, and Pidholosko were an extremely important source of cheap labor, cheap products and commodities for Lviv's economy. On the other hand, according to Ignacy Drexler, a Lviv engineer and official, this vicinity was "fatal" (Drexler, 1920) and was a separate challenge to urban planning. From the city's perspective, the northern and western suburbs looked unregulated, dirty, and dangerous areas which did not fall under the influence of the city police; it was from there that, allegedly, a "dance of witches," i.e., infectious diseases, came again and again. Apart from that, large-scale manipulations with land led to a chaotic development without an adequate infrastructure. These districts lacked not only gas, water, electricity, and sanitation, but also schools or hospitals.
In practical terms, Lviv was behind the leading cities of Central Europe, but the theoretical reasons for relevant urban transformations were formulated by the city council still before the war: it was in 1901 that the basic concept of the city with attached suburbs was presented. However, the implementation of these and other ideas was constantly postponed. Immediately after the war the next stage of the efforts to implement the idea began. In 1919-1921 Lviv architects and engineers created a draft of a new construction charter, which suggested adopting new approaches to the city development. The attention of the local authorities was drawn by a work of Ignacy Drexler, an engineer and municipal official, entitled "Great Lviv" (Drexler, 1920), which included arguments for the suitability of the city expansion and considerations regarding the practical implementation of this idea. Several years later, the magistrate charged Ignacy Drexler and Tadeusz Tolwiński, a professor of the Warsaw Polytechnic, to work out specific projects of the development of the city with the attached suburbs. Both projects had many common points: improving the road network and railway lines (construction of circular routes, new highways, tunnels under the Vysokyi Zamok and Citadel hills, a new railway station closer to the city center and wide boulevards in the center); regular replanning of parks, merging and increasing the number of green areas; the construction of sports and recreational complexes and objects (stadiums, swimming pools, fountains, playgrounds), museums, churches, markets; construction of new schools and hospitals; the separation of the northwestern industrial zone and of the southern part which would be free of industry; the construction of workers' residential colonies in the north and residential colonies for the elite in the south.
An important difference between the projects could be seen in a more modest and therefore cheaper scale of transformations suggested by Drexler, a Lviv resident. So, although the work of both authors was later used to create a master plan of the city development, Drexler's more realistic approach was reflected in the plan in a more tangible way. However, due to lack of funds, even the most economical ideas were implemented only by 15%. In the mid-1920s the city renewal was carried out mainly in the form of reconstruction, repair, or completion of existing buildings; it is remarkable that no school was built at that time. From 1927, when the financial condition of the city improved considerably, the implementation of the development plans was gradually started; however, it slowed down again in 1929-1933 due to the global economic crisis. At this stage, the construction of new residential districts was started, including exemplary areas and affordable social housing, some new health-care institutions were built.
In 1931, in the midst of the economic recession, the city council incorporated the suburbs into the city, thus implementing the most important point of the interwar master plan. Now the development of the city really meant building up a much wider area than before. New districts were to be provided with the same level of infrastructure as Lviv itself within 15 years (Bonusiak, 2000, 31). The author of one of the brochures, published by the city council in 1939, said: "The incorporated communes are populated mostly by poor people; they were suburban areas with no water supply and no sewage, with primitive lighting and earth roads everywhere, and were considerably different in their appearance from the old city. ... the actual incorporation of the suburbs has not been completed by now and will not be over very soon" (Lwów 1934-39..., 1939, 72). The problem of water supply was among thr most difficult ones, which required the construction of a new water supply system. The issue was extremely acute in the densely populated areas of Klepariv and Zamarstyniv. The ambitious plans to build a new network of roads, highways, and railways in the northern part of Lviv in the last decade before the Second World War were not implemented. The city council only managed to make some point changes. In Zamarstyniv, new public facilities appeared: a building for firefighters, a swimming pool complex, several schools, an exemplary city health and social care center (in the building of the former Juliusz Słowacki school in vul. Zamarstynivska, 132), which also served Klepariv and Male Holosko. Pidzamche was left outside the current city development plans, except for a partial regulation of vul. Poltviana (ul. Pełtewna) in 1930 (Lwów 1934-39..., 1939, 7), though the district was neither an important part of the city nor one of the newly incorporated suburbs. The municipal intervention in the local economy was limited to repairing and renovating important city life facilities like the city slaughterhouse or the building of the railway station "Pidzamche," damaged in time of the war. The renovation of roads and pavements and the construction of new streets and sewage system and electricity supply was made only in certain areas (Lwów 1934-39..., 1939, 72-74). Thus, the ambitious projects of redeveloping Pidzamche in a truly modern district, worked out before the war, were postponed again. First the world war and then the global economic crisis prevented the city from final "civilizing" and regulating its economic "backyard," as was done in contemporary West European cities.
An important, though isolated, case of developing interwar Pidzamche "from the grass roots" was the construction of the Community workers' house. This large building was built in 1933-1934 due to the efforts of Lviv workers who collected funds among their circle. The house was used both for social activities and for leisure.
In the interwar period Polish cities' industry was largely dependent on the state interventionism (Saryusz-Zaleski, 1930, 252). Actually, the Polish state did not have any special industrial plans concerning Lviv. All appropriate investments were directed to the so-called Central Industrial District, which did not include Lviv (Богданова, 2004, 171). Accordingly, Lviv's production structure was still limited to usual food and light industries. No new large factories appeared in the territory of Pidzamche, so the industrial development was restricted to small businesses. For example, the roofing felt factory of Kuznicki, the scale factory belonging to brothers Winter, and the meat products factory of Ichnowski, located on vul. Zavodska, the shoe factory "Pallis" on vul. Zhovkivska and the factory of chemicals "Tlenopol" on vul. Horodnytska, the textile factory "Len" on vul. Tkatska (Miller, 2010, 153-154, 159).An "Unformatted" Industrial Zone
Re-entering the city after the war, the Soviet authorities made efforts to change the way of life here and to lay the foundation of Soviet socialist life. The structure of social and economic life was almost completely transformed, as private property was abolished, the primacy of industrialization was introduced, special "one-party" rules of political behavior were established and a "totalizing" ideological field was created, which tried to generate not only "official," but also subjective significant senses, using both rough and delicate methods. On the one hand, the post-war Soviet Union was already a formed modern state and, in this sense, it had many features inherent to developed Western countries of that time, such as the development of modern industry and the key role of the state in ensuring the basic living standards of citizens. In this sense, the post-war development of Soviet Lviv picked up the baton of the Polish period in many aspects. On the other hand, despite all the common features of the modern state, the Soviet Union tried to keep its own specific socialist line, marking in a special way the peculiarities of production forms, and social, economic, and cultural practices, and ideological and symbolic senses, and the creation of material landscape. Thus, the actual socialist modern space was founded on the development of modernity, which Lviv had to deal with before, as well as on some specific additional meanings.
In the general scheme of Soviet Lviv's development Pidzamche again took a position, which was not very advantageous. The urban fabric was already formed here, and to renew it a lot of resources and effort was required. It was certainly an important industrial area, but with its inherent characteristics, standing in the way of rapid development within the planned evolution of the city. From the socialist government's perspective, food and light industries, which were traditional for Pidzamche, occupied only the second and third places in Lviv's industrial orientation. The first place was given to advanced engineering industry, radio electronics and electrical engineering, which, with few exceptions, were developed in other, more spacious areas. It was partly because of this that Pidzamche, despite its industrial experience, was left out of the leading positions in the industrialization of Lviv. Pidzamche's production facilities performed "minor" tasks and did it well, following well-tested routes and without massive investment. So, from the standpoint of senior officials, there was not much point in building a new socialist space in Pidzamche or planning any radical changes.
As can be understood from "The project of placing the first phase of construction in Lviv" (1960 and 1966), in Soviet Lviv the area of Pidzamche became hostage to its "traditional" industry, which was not large-scale enough to be really and radically modernized, but was still important to fully support and gradually develop "what already exists." Concerning Lviv's industrial areas, it was stated that "industrial enterprises are located mostly without complying with the necessary sanitary distances from homes and have no territorial reserves for development" (Город Львов…, 1966, 8). Of course, this had to do especially with Pidzamche's dense and chaotic housing, which was practically impossible to regulate (Дяк, 2008, 77). In view of this circumstance, Pidzamche was removed from almost all plans of major urban transformation. The district's important place in the urban structure of Lviv was revealed in considerable attention paid to organizing the city's northern outskirts, but outside Pidzamche, on the other side of the Poltva. The northern vicinities (Zamarstyniv, Holosko) were considered a territory not very promising for the development because of "very unfavourable soil conditions of the area with the presence of peat and high groundwater level" (Город Львов…,1960, 65). However, given the proximity to places of public entertainment (a forest near Briukhovychi and the "700th anniversary of the city" park which was still in project), convenient connection to the center (through the main routes of vul. Bohdana Khmelnytskoho and prosp. Chornovola) and, most importantly, the proximity to the northern industrial area, an important place of "working interest," it was decided to create two large housing estates, on vul. 700-richchia Lvova (now prosp. Chornovola) and in the area of the final segment of vul. Bohdana Khmelnytskoho, despite costly engineering works in wet soil (Город Львов…, 1966, 44). In the late 1960s, the development of northern Lviv, leaving aside Pidzamche, focused on new city outskirts separated from the industrial zone by protection green spaces along the Poltva channel which was still open at that time (Город Львов…, 1960, 94).
A radical change in the old space, which represented, in fact, the new socialist space, affected "closer" Pidzamche slightly, although original plans were grander. According to the 1946 first post-war general plan of Lviv, the area just behind the Opera Theatre was to be restructured significantly. It was planned to construct a large square with a monument to Stalin there, framed by new buildings and connected by a straight boulevard with the Vysokyi Zamok (Черкес, 1999). The project, however, appeared to be non-viable. Of the whole complex, only a high-rise apartment building was constructed. In subsequent years the development of this area was nevertheless continued, but on a more modest scale. In 1956 vul. Poltviana (later vul. 700-richchia Lvova, now prosp. Chornovola) was expanded and extended, a few buildings in the Neo-Functionalist style on typical projects being built at its beginning in the 1960s: the hotel "Lviv" (in place of the pl. Zernova square), the cinema "Myr" (partly in pl. Sv. Teodora) and the mini-skyscraper of the Office of Statistics.
While in the terms of urban planning the perspective of Pidzamche in Soviet Lviv was quite minimal, its social space was, however, changed substantially. New factories did not appear there, but the existing facilities and capacities were used, completed, reconstructed and restructured for different functions. However, production practices and social relations inside the factories and plants were constantly transformed. There was a clear formula for "repainting" capitalist production into socialist one. Thus, in 1939 the bourgeois confectionery "Branka" was exemplarily included in the space of the "Soviet civilization" according to the following scheme: "... after the liberation the workers elected the factory workers' control committee, headed by Liudmyla Wisman, and as early as 25 September the factory started to work. Members of workers' control were attached to all departments of the factory, and the committee became the center of the factory's life. (...) The committee was not limited to only control functions and was also engaged in the issues of the workers' welfare and the rise of their cultural level. It was on the initiative of the committee that a nursery and groups for studying the Ukrainian and Russian languages were organized at the factory, etc. " (Історія Львова..., 1956, 225). These initiatives were rather formal and "issued from above," but, gradually, they became essential elements of the workers' life and affected the "deeper" level of everyday life. The rules and practices of incorporating production in the model socialist format were eventually developed and complemented. In the 1950s, to match the status of the "real socialist production," it was necessary for the factories of Pidzamche to support initiatives of their colleagues from other cities (preferably from Moscow or Leningrad) and Soviet republics, to show their own initiatives, to get involved in the socialist competition for the title of the republic's and the Union's leading enterprises, to confer patronage on collective farms, to train their workers as foremost people in industry (Історія Львова, 1956, 238–262; Шумилович). Among Pidzamche's enterprises, the leader in the "introduction of communist labor methods" was the Shoe Factory № 3 (later known as the company "Progress"). There were attempts to fix Pidzamche's "socialistness" in the street landscape: in particular, in 1977 the northern section of Poltviana (later vul. 700-richchia Lvova) was renamed as vul. Ulyanovska, in honor of the socialist competition between Lviv and Ulyanovsk regions.
As part of the "Sovietization" of Pidzamche's space, some key symbolic places of the city were given new interpretation: in Soviet guidebooks, the church of St. Onuphrius was mentioned as the burial place of Ivan Fedorov, the Staryi Rynok (Old Market) square as the place of a strike organized by workers in the 1930s. The Vysokyi Zamok was to be associated not with the mound in honor of the Union of Lublin but with the Cossack siege of the royal castle located there. A TV tower, built on the Vysokyi Zamok in 1957, became an important all-Lviv symbol, which was invariably represented in guidebook narratives as "the old city's new life."
The material space of Pidzamche in Soviet Lviv changed gradually, mainly due to internal processes. In the early postwar years, changes were manifested primarily in the reconstruction of old buildings or assigning them with new functional purposes. One of the first old residential buildings on vul. Khimichna, 22, brought into service in 1951, became home for the Autoloader factory workers after restructuring (Heneha). The situation of the buildings on vul. Ohirkova near the railway station "Pidzamche," where originally various workshops and craft shops were situated, is quite conspicuous. After the Second World War, with the establishment of the Soviet government, the value of the station as an important railway junction increased, while the accompanying infrastructure virtually did not change. The problem of housing became especially acute, and production facilities were adapted for housing. A similar example is mentioned in an interview with the inhabitants of vul. Sheremety (a side street of vul. Zamarstynivska), where, in the early postwar years, a bakery was reorganized into a house where newcomers from the East were settled.
Changes in functional use certainly affected churches and other temples too. The present church of St. Josaphat was used in Soviet times as a film library, and the church of St. Martin belonged to a military electric repair factory and was used for economic purposes as well.
New typical panel houses also appeared in Pidzamche. However, they were chiefly built not in the form of complexes, but separately and in random places. The exception is a small newly-built block at the intersection of vul. Yanky Kupaly and vul. Skhidna, virtually on the outskirts of old Pidzamche. In the early 1960s, it was planned to build seven four-storied buildings there; however, only five three- and four-storied ones were built.
The main driving force of all changes in Pidzamche's urban landscape was the development of industrial objects. The development of factories and plants meant not only the emergence of new production facilities, but also a beautification of the surrounding areas. As Pidzamche residents say in their memoirs, in the 1950s-1960s "all the industrial facilities were built on the grass area. They started to asphalt factory yards, to make sidewalks along the streets, there were beds with beautiful flowers near the buildings." Gradually, benches, green spaces, playgrounds, and lawns appeared on the streets as the places of buildings, destroyed during the war or dismantled for wood, were brought into order.
The development of factories caused the appearance of adjoining objects of communal or cultural significance: children's educational institutions, kindergartens, laundries, clubs, which also meant better conditions of everyday life and deeper penetration of the senses of the "Soviet civilization." Large cinemas were located at the beginning of vul. Bohdana Khmelnytskoho, in the end of ul. Kalinina (now vul. Zamarstynivska) and at the beginning of vul. 700-richchia Lvova (now prosp. Chornovola). Virtually the entire area of Pidzamche was covered by a network of bigger and smaller factory clubs, which mainly attracted local residents as places where films could be watched. Also, there were many groups for children and adults, and even some billiard halls. The largest club of this kind was built by local workers in 1934 as the Community workers' house, reorganized in Soviet times as the Club of the Lviv tram and trolleybus direction (it functioned like this even before the war). An important "Soviet" object in postwar Lviv was also the railway station complex of "Pidzamche." The station directly connected the district and its industry with almost the whole territory of the Union.
The transformation of everyday space, which had to do with Pidzamche's enterprises, not always had a positive impact. In the course of time, the industrial development improved consumer infrastructure, but also narrowed free everyday space significantly. The factories occupied more and more territory whose reserves were limited in Pidzamche. Industrial objects "devoured" whole streets (e.g. vul. Boryslavska (earlier ul. Wilczków) street, which is still mentioned in a sign on one of the walls of the company "Svitoch" (Мельник, 2010, 153). Sometimes objects of this kind surrounded residential houses, creating a "close embrace" (it was what happened to a house on vul. Volynska, which became eventually encircled by the "Moldavvyno" factory, or a residential complex near the tram depot number 2, almost on all sides separated from the neighboring enterprises by a high wall).
In 1960 the authors of "The project of placing the first stage of construction in the city of Lviv in 1959-1965" described the northern area of the city as follows: "The northern part of the city has the worst housing. The streets are narrow, almost unregulated, green spaces are rare. Residential houses are mixed up with industrial enterprises" (Город Львов…, 1966, 14). Eventually, despite all the changes introduced by the Soviet regime, the overall picture did not change. Compared with the rest of the city, Pidzamche continued to remain a neglected, unregulated, marginalized district.
From the memories of Pidzamche residents:
"The [territory around the former] checkpoint was a working district. And the working district had one- or two-room apartments. All the doors faced ... Well, one door faced the staircase, and you had to go up the stairs and come to a round balcony. There were no conveniences there. In the apartments, there was only water. The toilet was on the balcony."
"There were some kind of shabby people there, simpler ones. When you go to the city, they all wear ties there, they're all doctors, you know, say (laughs), gentility. And here, there were working people. In fact, no one from the center came to work here. So, actually, the whole neighbourhood served all factories."
"Therewere problem people there, very problem people. Well, in what respect? Well, look at my class: someone's father was imprisoned, someone's mum drank, someone's family had no children at all. There were two extremely poor Jewish families, five children, they were so scrupulous. And it is clear that this is what the general atmosphere was at the [territory around the former] checkpoint. Actually, it was such a poor and criminal one."