ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS JAKUBSKIE SUBURB

Once Upon a Time, There Was Jakubskie Suburb

The photos found during moves and tidying up come from 1989, taken just before the district’s redevelopment. The city architects’ plan was already placing new houses and new residents there—people who were meant to dilute the atmosphere that had settled since the war, or maybe even earlier.

This exhibition is a kind of journey and a reminder of times that no longer exist, of a mood that has vanished, and of the small homeland where we grew up.

We dedicate it to our parents, grandparents, and friends who spent their childhood years there with us. It is also an important message to our children and all the young people for whom the history of this part of Toruń is slowly becoming just an anecdote...

Introduction to the exhibition text:

...our home was representative, probably the cleanest in the district, with three floors. It had large heavy doors that grandfather locked at night and a cellar where electricity was installed only in the 1970s. In fact, there were only three bulbs in the hallways so that they lit two rooms at once. In winter, we prepared the stove, sometimes struggling to break the slag to fill it from below again with newspapers, then wood, coal, and on top coke — half an hour later, the apartments would warm up.

To go to school, you turned left at the door, passing by a narrow path leading to people from another world, with whom we had little contact. I never really knew why we weren’t allowed to go there. Then, only a quick step to the corner, peeking to see if the “Murzynek” orangeade was available in the grocery — warm and delicious, with a cap like those on good beers today. If it was delivered, you had to hurry after school — it could be gone by noon. Around the corner on Studzienna Street was the “Cukierenka” (confectionery), later turned into a pub with beer, but at that time it still had doughnuts and sweet buns. Then on the left, we passed Konopackich Street, always sandy throughout childhood, and on the right, there was a view of the sports field. From that field during breaks, if the school side gate was open, you could watch the market — pigs, horses, cows, sometimes dogs. Transactions were made in improvised pens, usually accompanied by a mug of beer. They didn’t always open the gate; sometimes the payment was not for animals but for covering a sow or a mare — which was more interesting.

Somewhere around 7:55 a.m., everyone stood on the square in pairs, class by class. Teachers appeared in the doorway and waved a journal from 20 meters away — that was the signal to enter. This ritual only faded during severe frost when everyone crowded inside the building; then, in the evening, we had to treat lice using a towel turban soaked in vinegar solution.

At noon, on a bike, when butter was tossed down the store steps, you could stand there twice and in three hours trade with Malakowa from the kiosk for “Razem” or “Sztandar Młodych” with a band poster, preferably of Republika.

Behind the house was a garden with a huge apple tree, with three big branches — you could sit on them and eat apples. I haven’t seen apples like those for a long time: big, juicy, with worm-eaten spots. Later, they looked like volcanoes of flesh on eaten cores. There was a fortress there, a castle, an archaeological excavation, places of battles and wartime actions, a cemetery of canaries with frequent exhumations, a transport base, and maybe even a cosmodrome — although the Soyuz spaceship we built never took off. All made from chestnuts, sticks, and sometimes snow covered with colorful mixtures.

Looking now at computers, Game Boys, and DVDs of our children, I imagine that world and would like to sit once again on the hot asphalt in front of our grandfather’s tailor shop window, listen to stories about mice in backpacks under Tobruk, about scraping potatoes under Monte Cassino, and then slowly, until sunset, plan with my cousin all we would accomplish in life. And of course, the Murzynek orangeade should be warm.