In the early twentieth century before World War II, Przemyśl was the third largest city between Lwów and Kraków, and the second largest one in the Lwów Province (51 thousand inhabitants in 1931).
This was one of the interwar Przemyśl’s most elegant streets, and many of its residents were members of the city’s intellectual elite. The late nineteenth-century, two-storeyed house at 11 Smolki St. (designer unknown) housed the trading office of Józef Neger’s music instrument store as well as the editorial and administrative offices of the Orkiestra journal, of which Józef Koffler was the editor in chief from 1930. Lidia Teich, graduate of Vienna’s Music Academy, ran a private piano school in the same building. One of its occupants after World War II was the later musicologist and music critic Janusz Ekiert.
