16th century – the first masonry building was constructed.
1704 – the townhouse was badly
damaged.
Early 17th century – the
townhouse was reconstructed.
1863 – the shingle roof was replaced
with a tin one (architect Josef Mühel).
1867 – the wing was reconstructed
(the second floor added, architect Josef Mühel).
1912 – the townhouse was dismantled.
The townhouse on Fedorova street 25 was erected in place of a previous wooden
house. It was built by Kost Rusyn in the 16th century and later was
owned by the latter's son-in-law Achilla, a Greek. In 1601 the house became the
property of Aron Rubinowicz, a Jew from the suburban Jewish quarter, and from
that time on it was owned by representatives of the Jewish community. During
the 1704 Swedish invasion the townhouse was severely damaged and then rebuilt
by the then owner, well-known qahal burgomaster Zelman Pinkasowicz. According
to the 1767 tax registry, the townhouse was called Kryvesivska (Pol.
Krywesowska).
In the 1863
building file one can find a description of the old Kryvesivska townhouse: it
was a four-storied building with wooden intermediate floors, interior (that is,
overlooking the courtyard) balconies, stairs and a single-storied wing. The
building's façade width was 9.9 m. In 1863 the townhouse's high shingle roof was
replaced by a new tin one under a project designed by Josef Mühel. It was also
under his project that the single-storied wing was reconstructed into a
two-storied one. The building file informs that in the early 20th
century the building needed a restoration. As Majer Bałaban pointed out , at
that time it was "a tumbledown building, dirty and neglected, but
interesting as it was the last of all old buildings on that side of Żydowska
(Jewish) street". In 1912 the main building, owned by Isak Pancer, was
dismantled for the purpose of building a new one. However, for unknown reasons,
it was never built. Before dismantling the old townhouse was measured by
architect Jakób Scheller. In the rear part of the plot, there was a wing,
adjacent to the ritual bathhouse; it belonged to the qahal buildings on vul.
Arsenalska, 7, which were owned by the Jewish hospital. It was to that wing
that the slaughterhouse was moved from the dismantled qahal building on
Fedorova street 27 in 1912. The slaughterhouse was located on the ground floor;
above, some premises for the caretaker were added, which belonged to the plot number
25. The wing with the slaughterhouse, owned by Pancer, stood there till 1932,
when it was dismantled, as required by the Magistrate in 1930, due to an
emergency state.
The
Renaissance-style Kryvesivska townhouse has been preserved in a drawing of Żydowska
(Jewish) street, performed by Franciszek Kowalishyn in 1904. In 1944 Janusz
Witwicki, a Lviv architect, designed projects of reconstructing the lost
buildings of the Jewish quarter in Lviv’s historic center as of the 17th
century for the project of the Panorama
of medieval Lviv. This work was based on a rigorous research. Witwicki took
measurements of the Kryvesivska townhouse surviving fragments.
The vacant
parcel, where the Renaissance Kryvesivska townhouse with the wing had stood,
was owned by Isak Pancer and the Jewish community (hospital) till 1939. In that
same year the slaughterhouse ceased to function too.
In the Soviet
times the vacant parcels (number 23, 25) were used as a utility courtyard
where some temporary buildings belonging to the housing maintenance office were
located. In the southeast corner of the plot, at the synagogue's northern wall
and at the western wall of the Jewish ritual bathhouse with the mikvah (pool),
there was a rectangular two-tier structure. It was built immediately after the
war. The ground floor housed the communal enterprise workshops; upstairs, there
was the caretaker's room. This building did not coincide in plan with the
previous one, the slaughterhouse (shechita). It also was dismantled during the excavations as it had no
historical and architectural value. Yet earlier, not far from that structure,
at the boundary wall of the plot number 27, there were toilets, which were
dismantled in the late 1980s. Almost the whole court of the communal enterprise
was paved with concrete slabs. All the Soviet buildings were dismantled during
an architectural and archaeological research conducted in 2009-2011 under the
direction of Yuriy Lukomsky. Artifacts, found on this plot, reveal the stages
of the parcel formation: a 15th century residential log house in the
place of the later townhouse, log drainage wells, two wooden mikvoth (in the
rear part of the parcel), one of them private (in the townhouse’s cellar), a
well, paving stones, etc.
