At the last count, Lodz had 71, 000 small businesses, employing 85% of the city's workers.
For sure, in the past decade the economy of Lodz has been turned on its head.
In 1989, 90% of Lodz's people were in textiles and fibres, mostly destined for the Soviet Union.
Jews in particular flourished until their Lodz community, one of the largest in Europe, was wiped out in the Holocaust.
He was invited to participate in a ceremony in Lodz to commemorate 60 years since the ghetto's liquidation, but turned it down.
For all its grime, Lodz always had a strong cultural life too.
Mr Godson had served as a councillor in the city of Lodz before taking up a parliamentary seat, vacated by a party colleague after local elections.
For the Germans, Poles and Jews who made their fortunes here, Lodz was the promised land depicted in Andrzej Wajda's epic film of the same name.
The titanic red-brick mill built by Izrael Poznanski, Lodz's most flamboyant industrialist, still stands sentinel over the heart of the city, a cathedral to 19th-century capitalism.
One of my parents' closest friends spent the war first in the Lodz ghetto in occupied Poland, then survived a concentration camp by lying about his age.
It is no coincidence that its novice director, 30-year-old Song Il-Gon, learnt his craft at the Polish national film school in Lodz, where Mr Kieslowski also trained.
Hypermarkets have sprouted in the husks of Lodz's abandoned factories.
As Dr Colin described on July 9th to the International Cosmic Ray Conference held in Lodz, Poland, the moon blocks electrons and positrons as effectively as it blocks light.
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Germany and Russia (and Germans and Russians) mostly fared better, or less horribly, than the places in between (there were more Jews in the Polish city of Lodz alone than in Berlin and Vienna combined).
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Weaving together birth rates and immigration policy, he has an ingenious explanation for why workers from Lodz flock to London, where housing costs are higher than almost anywhere else in the world, whereas workers from Liverpool on the whole do not.
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