The year was 1989. I was still in primary school and unfortunately many of my memories connected with the politics of that time have since faded. It seems that my priorities were rather different when I was a teenager compared to now. However, there are some images from the years that followed that have lodged in the recesses of my memory: huge expanses of grass in the centre of Warsaw, having fun in the amusement park in front of the Palace of Culture and Science, and excursions with my best friend to Billa on ul. Chełmska, which was the first supermarket of a foreign chain in Poland.
History has come full circle – the block I live in today even includes a Simply supermarket (formerly Elea, which took over Billa’s Polish network a dozen or so years ago). And from the windows of our editorial office, I can see that the heart of the capital city now beats a few hundred metres away from the Palace of Culture and Science – somewhere near the Warsaw Financial Center, Rondo 1, Złote Tarasy, the Intercontinental and the Cosmopolitan luxury residential building... but all it would take to completely take me back to 1989 is the taste of Hortex ice cream, particularly now that it is warm and June has finally arrived. The first free elections also took place on a warm day at this time of year twenty-five years ago, on June 4th to be exact. The anniversary has inspired us to ask a few people who have been working in the sector for many years to take a journey back in time to show us how the free market economy, including the real estate market, developed through their eyes. And what did they tell us about? Old tenement buildings, apartments and hotels hastily adapted into offices, crumbling stadiums converted into outdoor bazaars for people seeking consumer goods, pre-fab apartment blocks, and fields where modern warehouse halls were to be built just a few years later. After a quarter of a century (although it now feels like an age has passed) we have 25 mln sqm of modern commercial real estate, but the appetite of the developers operating on the market is still not sated; on the contrary – their appetite has grown with the eating. Just like my appetite for ice cream desserts at Hortex on ul. Świętokrzyska many years ago.
