Plac Bankowy (in English: 'Bank Square') in Warsaw is one of that city's principal squares. Located downtown, adjacent to the Saxon Garden and Warsaw Arsenal, it is also a principal public-transport hub, with bus and streetcar stops and a Warsaw Metro station.
Created in the 19th century, under the Congress Kingdom, the square was designed to be one of the elegant areas of the country's capital. Notable buildings there included the Ministry of Revenues and Treasury (a building reconstructed by Antonio Corazzi) and the Bank of Poland and the Warsaw Stock Exchange (also by Corazzi). The square was originally triangular-shaped.
In the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the buildings on the square were destroyed and the square ceased to exist. After the war, city planners reconstructed only its historic western part, reconfiguring it into a rectangle.
Under the communist Polish People's Republic, the square was renamed Plac Dzierżyńskiego (Dzierżyński's Square) after Feliks Dzierżyński, Polish-born communist politician and founder of the communist Russian Cheka political police. In 1951 a monument to Dzierżyński was erected in the southern part of the square. Four decades later, in 1989, the statue's toppling helped mark the fall of communism in Poland.
Błękitny Wieżowiec (literally Blue Skyscraper) is a building located in Bank Square in Warsaw. It stands in the place that was occupied before World War II by Warsaw's largest synagogue, the Great Synagogue, which was blown up by the Germans in 1943. Initial concepts for the construction of the skyscraper had been put forward in the '50s, but construction finally began in the '70s and was suspended shortly after building the main structure. The unused construction was then often called the golden towers because of the color of the facade.
The work resumed in the late 1980s and was completed in 1991. The project has been modified by a Yugoslav Belgrade based company, replacing the copper-coloured facade with colorless reflective material, which gives a sky-blue reflection on a clear day (hence the current name). The skyscraper is 120 meters high and has 28 stories. Its most prominent tenant is the Polish branch of the automotive company Peugeot, announced by a large neon sign with the name of the company, mounted on the upper section. Previously, there was also a neon sign announcing the Sony company, which at that time hired office space in the Blue Skyscraper.