How to get ahead in advertising, comrade
A long time ago it was one of the most hated buildings in Warsaw along with the Palace of Culture & Science and the Warsaw Police Headquarters and in the 1970s and 1980s student demonstrations usually finished there if they weren't turned back by the police first.
Now the Centrum Bankowo-Finansowe (CBF) building, which was the former headquarters of the Communist Party on the corner of Aleje Jerozolimskie and Nowy Swiat, has succumbed to one of the most influential vices of Western imperialism advertising.
Last week, a 48 x 20 meter billboard was erected to hide and to help fund renovation work being carried out on the front elevation of the building. Where once party members peered from the windows of hundreds of offices in this impersonal sandstone building, now a giant pair of dark brown eyes gaze warmly at the passing traffic on Aleje Jerozolimskie.
The eyes belong to Alicja Resich-Modlinska, editor in chief of the new Polish edition of German "people" magazine Gala.
"The elegance of a monthly, up to date like a weekly," assures Resich-Modlinska in the advertisment. Her smiling face will be beaming down on commuters for the next three months, by which time the construction work to repair the building's crumbling fifth story will be completed.
Gala, which is owned by the Polish arm of German publishing giant G+J Gruner + Jahr Polska is due to be launched here in the coming months. The building managers at CBF had the power of veto to approve the billboard content.
Its arrival means that advertising space is getting pretty tight on this great edifice which, like most of the monumental buildings from the Stalinist era, is in fact a hollow square surrounded by four joined buildings.
Built in 1952 by a socialist government whose ideology eschewed any form of commercial advertising, it is now adorned with ads for the banks PBK and PKO; telecommunications giant TPSA and insurance bigwig Warta. The tire firm, Debica, also advertises there and at night the red neon lights of Ricoh faxes and copiers cast a rosy glow.
The corruption of the building began back in 1991 when it was converted into the Centrum Bankowo-Finansowe building. And it was only last year that the Warsaw Stock Exchange left the building for its new premises around the corner. But the gielda, as the stock exchange is referred to in Polish, left behind a small memento: an electronic tickertape board that flashes its stock prices across the bottom of the building.
