An Art Nouveau tenement from 1904 at Piotrkowska 37, next to the Lamplighter Monument marking Łódź's first electrically lit shop, opened at this address in 1906.
The tenement at Piotrkowska 37 displays Art Nouveau features and was built in 1904 on the site of much older single-storey buildings. Nearby, on the same small square, stands the Lamplighter Monument, which is no coincidence, as it links the history of this address to the electrification of Łódź.
The plot was originally part of a larger property, purchased probably from 1831 by Friedrich and Wilhelmine Sperling. The section under the present number 37 went to their son Gustav Sperling, who in 1860–1861 built a brick single-storey house here with residential rooms in the attic, replacing an earlier wooden building. In the 1860s the property passed to Ruchla Chai and Abraham Friedmann, and in the early 1870s belonged to Wilhelm Ginsberg. From the second half of the 1880s the property was co-owned by Icek Lejb Kohn and David Szmulowicz, and in the early twentieth century David Szmulowicz became the sole owner. In archival documents the surname is recorded as Szmulowicz, so one can find the spelling David Szmulowicz (Szmulewicz).
In 1904 David Szmulowicz built an impressive front tenement with Art Nouveau features, to a design by architect Gustav Landau-Gutenteger from 1903, the same architect who a few years earlier had designed the neighbouring S. Dyszkin Tenement. The business of Jacob Szmulowicz, owner of a woollen textile factory at Piotrkowska 78–80 and probably a relative of David, operated its own office and storage facility in the tenement. Before the First World War, the office of the Warrant Trading Depot Joint-Stock Company was based here.
In May 1906, in the elegant shop American Diamant Palace, opened at this address, electric lighting was switched on. This was the first shop in Łódź with such lighting, provisionally supplied by cable from the Grand Hotel, before the municipal power plant on Targowa Street began operation in September 1907. This event is commemorated by the Lamplighter Monument standing next to the tenement, unveiled on 21 September 2007 in the centennial year of the opening of Łódź's first municipal power plant. The bronze sculpture depicts an electrician on a ladder holding a light bulb next to a street lamp, by Marcel Szytenchel, funded by Dalkia Łódź and Łódzki Zakład Energetyczny [Łódź Energy Company], and forms part of the Gallery of Great Łódź Citizens.
A few dozen metres further along stands the David Berger Tenement, erected on an adjacent part of the same original plot as number 37, and further still the Tobias Tenenbaum Tenement.
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