House moved from Kopernika 42

Piotrkowska 282

The main alley of Łódź City Culture Park includes a blue house with red window shutters. It was moved here from Kopernika 42 street, having been built in the second half of the 19^th century in what was at the time the outskirts of Łódź, in Polesie district. In those days, the street was merely a dirt road called Teodor Milsch street, named after the man whose factory it led to. In 1878, the industrialist opened a brewery near the city forest. Later he created an “entertainment garden” next to it, which featured a restaurant, gazebos, and a concert stage. The surroundings were not all that attractive, however, as Władysław Reymont described them in “The Promised Land”: “The forest was pitiful, full of slowly dying pine trees, suffocated by the neighbouring factories, where wells drilled deeper and deeper drained the nearby lands, taking water away from the vegetation; the small river polluted with the outflow from the factory meandered between the yellowed trees like a multicoloured scarf, seeping poison into these mighty beings, spreading deadly miasma in its vicinity”.

It was an area inhabited by craftsmen of modest means. The single-storey building with a tall attic featured both living quarters and workshops. It has been determined that until WWII the building housed: a tailor shop first run by Idel Chęciński and later by Wanda Pilc; a shoemaker shop owned by Wawrzyniec Minczykiewicz and a dry-cleaners managed by Bronisława Jaskólska. The interior featured a two-bay design, meaning that the bottom floor was comprised of two rows of rooms. The building, covered with a gable roof, is distinctive for its decorative architectural details inspired by classicism. The windows and doors on the ground floor are profiled with strips and crowned with tympanums, which results in an interesting visual effect when coupled with the panelled window shutters. The construction is decorated with an inter-storey moulding and semi-circular attic windows located in the gable. The bright colour of the façade – discovered during renovation – add charm to the design.