Marine Station, currently: Emigration Museum

Marine Station, 1 Polska Street, currently: Emigration Museum in Gdynia

In 1932, the Station was designed by the renowned Dyckerhoff & Widmann S.A. company (subsidiary in Katowice). The construction works were carried out by the Skąpski, Wolski, Wiśniewski company. The construction proceeded at a fast pace, as on 8 December 1933, the ceremonial commissioning and blessing of the new building took place. In the architectural and structural sense, the Station consisted of two parts: the Passenger Hall and the Transit Warehouse (designed by Wacław Tomaszewski). Passenger service took place in a three-storey hall (with an area of 2.5 thousand m²), spacious and covered with a diametric, thin-walled reinforced concrete dome "Zeiss-Dywidag", with a pyramidal skylight. The façade of the station has clear features of modernist architecture, referring to the so-called Polish Art-Déco trend, through, among others, decorations in the form of two bas-reliefs of Polish eagles and two flagpoles clearly towering above the roof of the building. In turn, inside the station there were plaques dedicated to Marshal Piłsudski and the President of the Republic of Poland Ignacy Mościcki, and two commemorative plaques dedicated to the history of the construction of the port and its builders.

The main body of the station included such functions as: passenger information, ticket offices, post office, luggage storage, doctor's offices, restaurants and waiting rooms.

The Transit Warehouse was designed as a two-storey facility with a reinforced concrete frame structure. The lower floor of the Warehouse was occupied by luggage rooms, on the upper one, covered with an arched roof with ten spans, there was a luggage hall and a passenger check-in hall.

In May 2013, the renovation of the station (cost: PLN 43.9 million) began, which restored the original shape of the building and made it possible to adapt it to the needs of the newly-created Emigration Museum. The museum exhibition was officially opened in May 2015. The museum is the first one in Poland to present the collections, the stories of Polish emigration, and the achievements of the Polish diaspora scattered around the world.