Gutenberg House

At number 86 on Piotrkowska stands a front tenement house built around 1896 for printer and publisher Jan Petersilge. On the façade is a silhouette of Jan Gutenberg, alluding to the owner's profession, from which the building took its name.

Printer on the site of a former textile mill

Earlier owners of the plot included, among others, Gottlieb Lischke, Jan Bossert, Józef Müller and Mosiek Goldkranz. From the early 1880s the property belonged to Filip Lissner, who in 1882 erected a two-storey mechanical textile mill in the courtyard. Around 1893 Jan Petersilge purchased the land and a few years later built the front tenement house according to a design by Kazimierz Pomian-Sokołowski and Franciszek Chełmiński. The original 1896 design for the tenement house also envisaged a twin front building facing today's Sienkiewicza street, but it was never built - the eastern half of the plot remained undeveloped as late as the mid-1900s.

Façade of four styles

The elevation combines elements of neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance, Baroque and Art Nouveau. During renovation in 2011, painted garlands with pumpkins, sunflowers and grapes were uncovered and restored, along with decorative dragons which had previously been hidden under layers of paint. The tenement house was entered in the register of immovable heritage in the Łódź Voivodeship under number A/71, by decision of 20 January 1971.

Editorial offices, café and military headquarters

Before the First World War and in the interwar period, an elegant restaurant and café called "Louvre" operated in the building, run by Henryk Fuglewicz. From 1897 it housed the editorial office of the newspaper "Lodzer Zeitung", closed by the occupying authorities in January 1915; in its place from 1915 to 1918 "Deutsche Lodzer Zeitung" operated. In the interwar period, the National Party had its headquarters in the tenement house, and in September 1939, during the Battle of the Bzura, the headquarters of the German 8th Army was stationed there. On 9 April 1933, during an anti-German demonstration organised in response to growing terror in Nazi Germany, the "Freie Presse" printing house located in the building was destroyed.

Visual artists and today's appearance

From 1970 to 2020 the Łódź branch of the Union of Polish Visual Artists operated in the tenement house. Today the building contains shops on the ground floor and apartments on the upper storeys, and its neighbours are other historic addresses on Piotrkowska: Juliusz Heinzl's palace with Tuwim's Little Bench in front of the entrance and Herman Konstandt's tenement house on the other side of the street.

Practical information

• Address: Piotrkowska 86, Łódź.
• Getting there: by tram or bus to stops in the centre of Piotrkowska, then on foot.
• What to expect: a residential and commercial building; the façade with the Gutenberg portrait is best viewed from the opposite pavement.