A four-storey factory owner's tenement house, whose present, grand form dates from an extensive rebuilding in 1912 designed by Dawid Lande.
The townhouse numbered 56 stands in the strict centre of Piotrkowska and owes its present form to a rebuild in 1912. The façade is more recent than it might appear, but the history of the plot reaches back to the beginning of the street as a place of settlement for weavers brought to Łódź in the 1830s.
The plot under present-day Piotrkowska 56 was granted in August 1836 to weaver Juliusz Wergau, who was obliged at the time to build a weaving factory and residential house there. In the 1860s Juliusz Wergau was simultaneously the owner of a property at Piotrkowska 65, a few numbers further along. In the 1860s the Wergau family built a single-storey townhouse on the front, which the next owner, Leopold Hintz, raised by one storey in accordance with a document from 1870. After Hintz's death in 1879, the property was taken over by Juliusz Mitzner, who ran a spinning mill and a mechanised scarf and braid weaving mill in the outbuildings.
In the early 1890s the property was purchased by Fryderyk Wilhelm Schweikert, who moved the production of hand workshops previously operating on present-day Główna Street here. The works did not remain here long, as in the mid-1890s the Schweikerts relocated the factory to a new, larger plant at Wólczańska Street 215. The property on Piotrkowska itself remained in the hands of the family, however.
Robert Schweikert, son of Fryderyk Wilhelm, commissioned a thorough rebuild of the front building in 1912. This resulted in a splendid four-storey townhouse, which can be seen to this day. The rebuild project was prepared by architect Dawid Lande, active in Łódź at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The two-storey building from before this rebuild can still be seen in a photograph by E. Stumman from the second half of the 1870s. This version of the building replaced a considerably more modest, lower front house from the Wergau and Hintz era.
The layout of buildings at the rear of the property differs today from the state before the Second World War. A section of the northern outbuilding and buildings that once extended towards Narutowicza Street 5 and 7 have disappeared. When walking along Piotrkowska, it is worth glancing at neighbouring numbers: at 59 stands the townhouse of the Mintzberg (Mincberg) family, and a dozen or so numbers further on, at 65, the townhouse of Szaia Rosenblatt. On the opposite side of the street it is worth paying attention to the townhouse of Izrael Poznański and the townhouse of Dawid Prussak standing nearby.
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