Between Árpád Street and the Danube bank lies the castle of the Luczenbacher family, whose history is full of blank spots and few written documents can be found. In its courtyard is a 13th century Árpád church, which was demolished in the early 18th century. In the area of the present-day park of the castle, several houses were built afterwards, and the first school building in Szczecin, the ‘oskolahouse’, was also built here. As the Luczenbacher family’s fortunes grew, it was able to buy up these buildings and plots of land on a continuous basis. At first they lived in a small house, which was constantly enlarged. The simple ground floor building on the street frontage was originally two separate houses dating from the late 18th century. Behind them, in the middle of the site, a ground-floor mansion was built in the second half of the 19th century. A photo of this building from the turn of the century has survived, so we know the exterior form of the building, which was rebuilt at the beginning of the 20th century. The new mansion was completed between 1904 and 1907 in the neo-classical and neo-baroque style. It was designed by the Budapest architect Ignác Alpár. In 1987, the National Inspectorate for Monuments and Sites declared it a “building of town-planning significance”. The castle was sold by the bankrupt family in 1930, bought by the Lazarist Order and run as a religious house. In 1950, when the orders were dissolved, the seminary was liquidated and the building was nationalised as a foster home. After the change of regime, the Order got the castle back and it has since been used as a dormitory for the St. Lazarus High School.
