A tenement house with a brick front section from the 1870s, whose corner Astoria cafe saw guests arrested by the Germans on 1 November 1939, some later shot.
The tenement at Piotrkowska 27 travelled over a century from a wooden weaver's cottage to a tenement with a corner premises where Łódź bohemia gathered in the interwar period. Today the building is part of the historic streetscape of Piotrkowska, but its history reaches back to the beginning of the 19th century.
In 1827 weaver Ferdynand Lück built on this plot a timber house with straw roof, fairly imposing and costly for the time. In 1842 he sold the property to miller Samuel Meischatz, and after his death the estate passed to his son, Wilhelm Meischatz. By the early 1870s a brick building stood on the front, and Wilhelm Meischatz gradually extended the tenement toward the then Ceglielna Street, now Więckowskiego, together with outbuildings. In 1896 the construction of two two-storey residential outbuildings on the same plot was recorded. This address also housed Moses Perzik's fabric warehouse and an outlet of A.G. Borst's cloth and worsted factory from Zgierz, run by Simon Cohn.
In the interwar period a cafe called Cafe Astoria operated in the corner premises, run by B. Fenigstein. It was a gathering place for Łódź bohemia and the Jewish artistic community, one of the social hubs of pre-war Piotrkowska, much like the premises in the nearby tenement of Wilhelm Landau.
On 1 November 1939 German officers entered Cafe Astoria and detained the guests present. Some of those detained were shot the following day, 2 November, in Łagiewniki forest. The rest were held in the prison on Radogoszcz. This event is part of the first weeks of the German occupation of Łódź, when German authorities struck at places frequented by the city's intelligentsia and artistic circles.
The entire section of Piotrkowska Street, including number 27, is entered in the register of monuments as an urban complex under number A/48, and in 2015 acquired the status of historic monument. Similar status covers neighbouring buildings, for instance the tenement of the Belin family or the nearby house of Rafał Sachs.
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