A Tourist Center to Be Launched at Solidarity’s Berth

The glory has faded for the workers of this city’s great shipyard, birthplace of the Solidarity union movement that brought democracy to Poland and helped topple communism throughout Eastern Europe.

Men like Tadeusz Zawadko stood up against Communist authorities in a historic 1980 strike and ultimately saw victory in Poland’s democratic transition nine years later.

Now, after the former Lenin Shipyard’s bankruptcy and 1998 sale, plans are underway to concentrate shipbuilding in less than half the facility’s area and turn 173 acres of prime waterfront real estate into a tourist, entertainment, business, retail and technology center.

The new owners, headed by the Gdynia Shipyard Group based just up the Baltic coast, expect the transformation to give Gdansk a new downtown, even as key sites marking Solidarity’s history are preserved and used to draw tourists. Planners hope it will become the key commercial center for a region of 2.5 million people.

Veterans like Zawadko, 46, who started work here as a teenager and now assembles ship hulls, have mixed feelings about the redevelopment plans.

“I guess it’s OK. Why should it stand empty?” Zawadko said. But he still is tied to the shipyard as a workplace and says he is “not too happy” about the idea of it turning into a tourist attraction.

Some aspects of the project will resemble Boston’s Quincy Market or New York City’s Battery Park, said Janusz Lipinski, president of Synergia 99, the firm in charge of redevelopment. Synergia 99 is controlled by the Gdynia Shipyard Group, but 26% of its shares are held by private equity investment funds managed by TDA Capital Partners, a U.S. financial management group.

Synergia 99 plans to sell off land-use rights at the site, with about six developers handling different parts of the project, Lipinski said.

Lech Walesa led the Gdansk strike and went on to serve as Poland’s president. The shipyard in Gdynia, 10 miles northwest of Gdansk and part of the same metropolitan area, had to be more nimble in coping with privatization in the mid-1990s because it lacked the political clout and self-assurance of its famous Gdansk counterpart.

Gdynia shipyard cut costs and nearly tripled sales per employee from 1993 to 1997, then was the lead buyer in the consortium that took over Gdansk.

The planned transformation of the Gdansk shipyard “means the industrial epoch is passing,” Lipinski said. “Heavy industry is gone. The new economy is coming.”

But shipbuilding is not quite ready to disappear here. Depending on investment decisions to be made in the next few years, it may survive for decades.

About 70% of production work now takes place in a 150-acre area on an island that forms part of the shipyard, although the slips where vessels are assembled before being launched is in the part due for redevelopment.

Ten ships were built in Gdansk last year. The yard plans to produce just seven this year, but they will be larger and of greater total value, said Stanislaw Twarowski, the shipyard’s managing director. Since 1949, the shipyard has produced 986 ships, he said.

Contracts are already signed for the full shipbuilding capacity of the Gdynia Shipyard Group, including the Gdansk facilities, through 2003, Twarowski added. Employment at the Gdansk shipyard has grown to 3,800 from 2,200 when it was sold.

“The present situation and the future for at least 10 years is very positive,” Twarowski said. But serious challenges lie beyond the next decade because of the rise of China as a major shipbuilding power, and because the Polish government, unlike many others, does not subsidize shipbuilding, he said.

The key factor in the Gdansk shipyard’s future will be whether ship-launching facilities are built on the island, Twarowski said. If dry docks or slips are constructed there, then “it would be a signal that for at least the next 20 years, fully equipped vessels will be built on this area,” he said. That decision will be made next year at the earliest and will be taken on purely business grounds, he said.

If new facilities are not built in Gdansk, work on components such as pieces of ships’ hulls would continue indefinitely, with assembly at the Gdynia shipyard, he added.

Bogdan Rapala, 51, another veteran worker, said he’s resigned to the shift in how most of the shipyard’s land will be used. “If the tourists pay well, maybe that’s a good idea,” he said.

The anti-Communist strikes that brought worldwide fame to the Gdansk shipyard and its workers in retrospect seem like “a joyful time,” although while it was happening, “we were scared,” Rapala said. Now he has other concerns, and post-Communist governments have been disappointing, he added.

“The things that were supposed to happen didn’t happen,” he said. “All sorts of things that were promised weren’t delivered, for the whole country. Before there was nothing in the shops, but we had money. Now there are all kinds of things in the shops, but we don’t have money. . . . Maybe in the beginning [of the democratic era] it was important to me that this was such a historic place. But not anymore.”