Janasz Warszawski Tenement House

The tenement at Piotrkowska 116 in Łódź is a three-storey front building, erected to a design from 1883 for manufacturer Janasz (Jonasz) Warszawski. It stands immediately next to a twin property at number 114, which Warszawski later incorporated into his complex.

Construction and expansion of the property

The plot bore the former mortgage number 536. Earlier owners of the plot included the town cashier Stanisław Gozdowski, a Łódź-born resident who lived from 1777 to 1857, and the Petzold family, who in 1865 divided the property into a section facing Piotrkowska and a section facing present-day Sienkiewicza Street. At least from the first half of the 1880s, the western half of the property, facing Piotrkowska, belonged to Janasz Warszawski. The three-storey front tenement was erected to a design from 1883, and by the end of the 1880s numerous outbuildings were added to it. A document from 1888 confirms the construction of a brick, three-storey residential house and a brick, single-storey outbuilding under the then number 536.

Connection with the property at number 114

By the early 1890s, Janasz Warszawski was already the owner of the entire property at Piotrkowska 116, extending to present-day Sienkiewicza Street, as well as the western half of the neighbouring property at Piotrkowska 114. On the combined plots he erected numerous residential, commercial and industrial buildings. On the side of present Sienkiewicza 61, he put up a factory building, in which small textile enterprises operated for successive decades: weaving mills, hosiery mills, twisting mills and stocking and knitwear factories. In the prewar tenement there also operated a plush factory run by the partnership of Abe Nejman and Chaim Rumkowski, the same Chaim Rumkowski who during the war headed the Judenrat of the Łódź ghetto. Between properties 114 and 116 there also stood a separate brick market hall, built in 1896-1899 to a design by architect Franciszek Chełminski, in neoclassical style, with columns, stuccowork and semicircular arched windows. This hall is now entered in the heritage register and for many years housed, among other things, the Atlas Sztuki Gallery, active from 2003 to 2017.

Subsequent owners

Around 1904, probably after the death of Janasz Warszawski, the neighbouring property at Piotrkowska 114 passed into the hands of the firm "Landau i Co." By the early second decade of the twentieth century, both properties, 114 and 116, belonged to the married couple Chana Szyfra and Abram Szlama Freind. The house tariff from 1920 still lists the Freind couple as owners.

Piotrkowska in this location

The tenement adjoins directly with a twin front building, the Janasz Warszawski Tenement House at number 114, erected for the same owner ten years later. In the area there also stand other tenements of this part of the pedestrian mall, among them the Mordka Helman Tenement House and the Albert Böhme Tenement House with the Re:Medium gallery.

Practical information

• Address: ul. Piotrkowska 116, Łódź.
• Getting there: on foot or by public transport to the city centre; the building stands directly on the pedestrian mall.
• What to expect: the façade of a three-storey front tenement from 1883, part of the former complex of manufacturer Janasz Warszawski, a good point on a walking route along Piotrkowska.