Juliusz Pfeiffer Tenement House

A three-storey tenement house at Piotrkowska 71 stands on a plot that in the 1830s belonged to Gottlieb Jantsch and remained unbuilt along the street for a long time. Today it is recognised by almost everyone who walks along the arcade towards Artura Rubinsteina passage, because one of the best-known frescoes in Łódź was painted on the side wall of the building.

From linen mill to the Pfeiffer tenement house

In 1835, the plot at the current number 71 was purchased by weaver Józef Ritter, obliged to construct a street-facing house and operate a linen and cotton mill with six weaving workshops in the courtyard. Such an arrangement, with a house facing the street and workshops at the back of the property, was typical of early settlement-period Piotrkowska. In the 1880s, the property came under the ownership of Juliusz Pfeiffer, son of Florian Pfeiffer, the previous owner of the neighbouring property at number 69. It was during his time that the property acquired the surname it bears to this day. The current three-storey street-facing tenement house was constructed according to a design from 1892, preserved in the building documentation as a plan of a three-storey house and a single-storey outbuilding. The 1920 house register still lists the Pfeiffer family as owners.

Shops and workshops at the turn of the century

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the ground floor and premises in the tenement house were rented by businesses typical of commercial Piotrkowska. There was a photographic studio and photographic materials store belonging to Franciszek Postleb, a hat shop run by Karol Goeppert for over thirty years until 1939, and from July 1893 a bookshop and music score store run by R. Schatkey. This mix of tenants—photographer, hatter, bookseller—shows how diverse the trade that occupied a single rental tenement house of that period could be.

Fresco: Łódź in a nutshell

A fresco titled "Łódź in a nutshell" was painted on the wall of the tenement house facing Artura Rubinsteina passage. It was created between 28 August and 3 November 2000 according to a design by Krzysztof Jaśkiewicz. It depicts an illusionistic façade of a tenement house with balconies, windows and shopfronts, in which likenesses of thirty-one well-known figures associated with Łódź were placed, and in the gate stands Lili Fontelli next to anonymous figures of a weaver and a Jewish resident from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The idea for the mural arose in 1996 and was inspired by similar narrative frescoes on buildings in Lyon, Barcelona and Rome. The figures to be painted were selected in a competition called "You too can go down in history", organised by city architect Piotr Biliński and the Łódź branch of Gazeta Wyborcza.

Several dozen metres further on, on the other side of the street, stands the Moszek Działowski Tenement House, and next to it the Maksymilian Goldfeder Palace, further stops along this stretch of Piotrkowska. In the direction of Plac Wolności, on the same side of the street, it is also worth visiting the former Hotel Victoria, a theatre venue from over a century ago.

Practical information

• Address: Piotrkowska 71, Łódź, fresco on the wall facing Artura Rubinsteina passage
• Getting there: by tram or bus to stops on Piotrkowska in Śródmieście [city centre], then on foot along the arcade
• What to expect: a nineteenth-century street-facing tenement house and a painted fresco with likenesses of well-known Łódź residents in the side passage