Newcomers were greeted by the “characteristic, dirty fog on the horizon” and from the “gigantic cloud of smoke” surfaced “a forest of brick chimneys” with “proud hatred throwing to the sky smoke, fire and ashes”, creating “the impression that a legion of blazing volcanoes embraced the proletarian city.” This is how the industrial city of Łódź was described in the turn of the 19th and 20th century by journalists visiting it with an “impression of curiosity if not shame, that one goes for the first time to the unknown city, to know the places about which only gossip or fairytales tell us what happens there.” (Glisczyński and Mieszkowski 1894). Łódź, a rapidly growing textile production center, was one of the few places that paved the way to industrial, capitalist modernization in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. It was inhabited by large non-Polish populations and came to be perceived as alien, hostile and even savage. Fast-developing textile giant, the biggest city besides Warsaw from Berlin to Moscow, occupied a peculiar position in Polish press. The tension inherent in the desire to be modern appeared with all its strength in the discourses surrounding an alien, rapidly developing industrial textile. I attempt to reconstruct the logic of press and reportage discourses dealing with this new experience. The press, reportage, and literary discourses concerning the newly established locus of modernity – the city of Łódź – reveal a phantasmatic logic of discourse. Materials describe an imaginary diagnosis of reality and a fantasy about its utopian version, as well as the obstacles, which always prevent the fulfillment of utopia and even threaten it with a more horrific dystopian vision. Still, the clue lies in the obstacle itself, which is at the same time the foundation allowing any utopian project to appear at all, as well a vision of reality.