Warsaw Fotoplastikon

This guide to the Warsaw Fotoplastikon traces a nineteenth-century stereoscope theatre that once drew crowds across some two hundred fifty European cities before cinema took over almost everywhere else. It follows how the device kept running here in the Hoser tenement, installed by collector Ludwik Krempa in 1946, and how its dark, silent seats let the Polish underground pass messages during the Nazi occupation. Listen from a seat near the middle of the room, where the hum of the drum's gears is loudest.