Early Capitalism
After the annexation of Galicia to the Habsburg Empire the Austrian administration launched its own project of the urban modernization of Lviv. New streets were laid and put in order, theaters and swimming pools were built, designed to provide newly arrived officials with "metropolitan" entertainments. New social practices for the nobility, such as balls and charity, were introduced. However, during the first half of the nineteenth century official innovations could be seen mainly in the central part of the city. The Austrians developed Lviv primarily as a center of government and administration. In the suburbs, they were interested only in places for military warehouses, barracks, and prisons, refurbishing former monasteries and convents with this in view. During the first half of the nineteenth century the city lacked resources and ideas both for broad adoption of truly progressive practices of that time and for modern infrastructure. Thus, the development of the northern suburb, which was called Zhovkivske in Austrian Lviv, depended only on the capabilities and enthusiasm of the local population or casual investors.
As of the early nineteenth century, the early modern local space of Pidzamche was more progressive in economic terms when compared with what is now the central part of Lviv, but more backward when considered in the context of West and Central Europe. By that time, Pidzamche could no longer boast of modern European trends. Perhaps the only exception was the production of alcohol. Ignacy Chodynicki, a Lviv nineteenth-century historian, claimed that in 1812 there were four large factories of liqueurs and vodkas in Lviv; however, in his opinion, only two of them had the right to be called factories, including the world famous Baczewski factory (Chodynicki, 1829, 463 ). Also, many breweries functioned, in particular in Pidzamche, one of them is mentioned by Stanisław Schnür-Pepłowski, a contemporary historian: this is a brewery built by Jan Karpf, a German entrepreneur, in 1792 on the place of the demolished Armenian church of St. Anne (Schnür-Pepłowski, 1896, 174). On the Misjonarzów (Missionaries) square (the area of the intersection of prosp. Chornovola and vul. Pid Dubom) the city mead distillery functioned.
Though the Austrians limited the influence of the nobility on the city affairs and cancelled the guild restrictions for craftsmen (Дудяк, 2013, 522), in Galicia it was agriculture that they placed their hope in and not industry (Saryusz-Zaleski, 1930, 11). However, in order to add weight to the "German element" in the province, the central government encouraged Austrian entrepreneurs to move there.
The influx of German officials, merchants, and entrepreneurs contributed in the development of commercial, industrial, and public life. German entrepreneurs, however, were not necessarily eager to build factories or plants. A lot of foreign investments in Zhovkivske suburb were made in agriculture, so in the early nineteenth century there were large farms and vegetable gardens there. We know of the existence of several farms owned by Germans named Schneider and Heisler in the vicinity of what is now vul. Donetska, where the Schneider family house, built in the late nineteenth century, has survived till our days under the number 11. S. Schnür-Pepłowski mentioned also vegetable farms owned by German entrepreneurs on vul. Zamarstynivska (Schnür-Pepłowski, 1896, 182). He also observed that German gardeners in Lviv had no real competition in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
By 1850 only nine factories were built in Lviv (Історія Львова, 1956, 57). Therefore, the local industry was supported mainly by large craftmen's workshops and partially by mechanized manufactories (a transitional form of production between the workshop and the factory), which numbered over forty at that time (Кісь, 1968, 162). Thus, vul. Tkatska (Weaver's Street), as evidenced by its name, housed several shops of weavers who continued to produce fabrics manually.
The only important event of the contemporary economic life were the "Lviv Contracts," an annual fair of regional significance. Agreements concluded there concerned mainly selling big quantities of vegetables to the more developed industrial centers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The general economic stagnation in Lviv is evidenced by the fact that many officials subleased their homes to the "Lviv Contracts" guest participants. For them, this was almost the only way to cope with the rent during the year. Similarly, it was the successful sale of goods during the "Contracts" that the material well-being of the manufacturers of furniture, clothing, or carriages in the following year depended on (Schnür-Pepłowski, 1896, 49).
While the Lviv craftsmen elite did not notice the new realities and tried to bring back the success of the old economic schemes, it was the Jewish community, also focused on "business affairs" but not fettered with the burden of traditions, that became the main engine of capitalism in Lviv. Jewish entrepreneurs were used to invest in retail trade of day-to-day goods though it was not too presentable (thus deserving contempt from those aiming to buy "luxury" expensive items). This was consistent with the economic niche, which the Jews were driven into by the representatives of Christian nobility in previous centuries. However, in the conditions of the initial accumulation of capital in Lviv, this strategy proved to be rather productive. This allowed Jewish traders to gradually develop, by way of evolution, capitalist practices on the local ground, without waiting for the introduction of adopted patterns "from above and from the outside." For a long time, Lviv Christian traders took the tactics of their Jewish counterparts contemptuously, despite the fact that the latter reproduced the general logic of the initial development of capitalism in West Europe more adequately. The Jewish approach to commerce was described in 1877 as follows: "The Jews, with their usual skill, (...) fill the city with more and more worse and cheaper goods. They have instilled a well-known slogan of the German business, "Bad but cheap!", in the local trading ground and gain quite a lot on this. Fine shops owned by Christians merchants are increasingly empty. Our merchants have almost completely left the market at the Krakivska gate, while Jewish trading pioneers are more and more present at the Halytsky market, on the Kapitulna and Mariacka squares, on ul. Karola Ludwika; there are some areas of trade, which are dominated almost exclusively by the Jews, and there are more and more stores where Christian merchants sell Jewish goods" (Merunowicz, 1877, 78).
There were attempts to fight with the effective but unworthy "Jewish basic capitalism," concentrated on the commercial space of the Krakidały. The Wool Fair was opened in 1837, conceived as a way to leave out Jewish dealers who bought wool at low prices directly from small producers, visiting their yards. The city invested three thousand zlotys in this fair, and the participants were exempt from fees in the hope of significant future benefits. However, the fair failed to change the already established patterns, and in 1855 it was moved to Brody (Schnür-Pepłowski, 1896, 50). A similar fate befell the St. Agnieszka Fair organized in about the same time; eventually, it also ceased to attract customers. Meanwhile, resources were accumulated gradually among the "basic" entrepreneurs of the Zhovkivske suburb allowing big Jewish factory owners and financiers to penetrate into the Lviv market in the late nineteenth century.Despite all the efforts to modernize Galician life, exerted by the Austrian authorities, new forms of cultural or economic behavior constantly encountered significant resistance on the part of its traditional, "old" types. To make an irreversible breakthrough in this direction, both the imperial administration and local adherents of modern capitalism lacked resources. So modern and traditional practices became intricately intertwined on Lviv's soil, forming hybrid phenomena, where neither new nor old could prevail. Speaking of the nineteenth-century Lviv, one cannot ignore the peculiar "Lviv-style capitalism," whose underdevelopment was made up for by local identity. The Zhovkivske suburb, located to the north of the central part of the city, was an important testing area for the implementation of capitalism in Lviv and for the elaboration of specific local practices.
The emergence of the modern Pidzamche district can be dated to the mid-nineteenth century. It was no coincidence that factors, which led to the emergence of another particular territory in the city, came together in one place. The example of Pidzamche can be regarded as a model of specific cultural and economic processes typical of Austrian Lviv. The history of Pidzamche is inextricably linked to the particular history of the nineteenth century modernization of Lviv and reflects its key points. The contradiction, ambiguity, and vagueness of the district is a direct consequence of the ambiguous, contradictory, and blurred process of modernization and urbanization in this region. From the very beginning, Pidzamche combined purely modern and purely traditional features. Neither of them ever became decisive.
The same is
true for the features of the city in its "Habsburg" period. Pidzamche
is the product of the so-called "pursuing," half-way modernization
which overtook Lviv as the capital of a marginal province of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. The urbanization of this Lviv suburb proves that the
main objective of Austrian Lviv, that is, "to catch up with the center"
and "to become a full-fledged metropolis," was not impracticable and
utopian. It required a lot of time and effort to adapt the adopted practices to
local conditions, but gradually Lviv began to cope with these challenges. However,
the question of the ultimate success of the modernization project in "Habsburg"
Lviv will always remain open. The First World War severely disrupted the
development of the city in general and of Pidzamche in particular.
The modern space of nineteenth-century Pidzamche was formed at the intersection
of different strategies used by the city in respect to its suburbs. On the one
hand, these strategies were determined by the traditionally indifferent and
somewhat hostile attitude towards Pidzamche and its inhabitants and, on the
other hand, by the awareness of the potential importance of the industrial
district for the entire city. Lviv officials and technical elites repeatedly
developed specific projects to be implemented in Pidzamche (from a project of a
railway between Lviv and Brody to a plan for a new city center at Habrielivka/Gabrielówka),
with the aim of the full realization of the district's modern potential, which
would finally turn it into an important engine for the modernization of the
entire city. Most of these ideas remained on paper, but there were cases of
more or less successful implementation of some of them into practice. Private
business activity was a critically important factor. The construction of
factories meant a slow but radical change of the material environment and
social and everyday practices, and therefore a change of the sense of local
identity as well.
Among the main features of the "modern" social space of Pidzamche during the gradual inclusion of Lviv in the advanced European socio-cultural and capitalist context (nineteenth century — early twentieth century), the following ones can be mentioned:— the main "oases of the new" were numerous industrial facilities, which changed the traditional appearance of the district, introduced new, purely capitalist, production practices and relationships and determined daily life;
— modernization initiatives of the authorities were "half-hearted" and insufficient;
— an important point in the process of Pidzamche's modernization was a step-by-step and, unfortunately, very minimal "modernization" of how it was treated by the Lviv elite: from the idea of Pidzamche as a neglected, hopelessly "backward and downtrodden" neighbourhood to the idea of it as an important space which should be worked with for the further development of the entire city;
— the construction of a railway line through Pidzamche was very important and not only accelerated the arrival of new industry here, but also became an important factor;
— there were some significant objects changing the internal symbolic space;
— the perception of Pidzamche as a modern space, where one can realize not only industrial, but also cultural or social modern practices, was typical mainly of "internal" agents, i.e. local (Jewish) industrialists and workers;
— many modernization projects, both external (generated by the authorities and technical elites) and internal, failed because of geopolitical upheavals which had more impact on East Central Europe than on West Europe.
More detailed history of the formation of Pidzamche's modern social space can be found in other texts of this section presented according to the main stages of Lviv's social and political life in the nineteenth century and is specific research micro focuses.