In the last few days of 1962, a new building with eight apartments was completed here at the corner of Nõukogude and Roosi streets, built according to a standard project for the employees of the Pärnu branch of the Northern High Voltage Networks. The previously undeveloped plot was separated from an original suburban plot of land only a year earlier, whose earliest known owner was the cooper Grewe in the mid-19th century. 

Part of Grewe’s property 

The large plot of land No. 169, which stretched all the way to Promenaadi (A.H. Tammsaare) Street, was the last sloboda house facing the coastal pasture. The old house on the site still stands today (Roosi 15), albeit in a modernised form, just behind the Soviet-era apartment building. 

The owner of the house and large plot of land was a cooper from Hanover, Heinrich Conrad Grewe (1811-1888), who had married Helene Christine Bartels in Pärnu. Most of Grewe’s descendants moved on to Russia – his son Leopold Conrad became a doctor and pharmacist in Samara, his second son Conrad was a secondary school principal in Yeletsk, and his son Ferdinand was a lawyer in Moscow. Probably because of this, Grewe’s property passed into the ownership of his wife’s sister, Agathe Elisabeth Schmidt (1826-1882), after he died. 

The house remained in the hands of this family for more than half a century, and over the years, the large property was divided up piece by piece – building plots were cut for Elias Wesset (in 1928, Supeluse 26) and Hans Pärmann (in 1932, Supeluse 24). 

Deportation of Germans 

The last owner of the property before World War II was Emma Christine Anna Schmidt (1862-1945), who, as an exceptional representative of the German nation, decided not to leave during the was of resettlements to Germany. It is precisely because of her nationality that she became a victim of Soviet repression – the elderly Emma Schmidt was deported on 15 August 1945. 

This was a separate wave of deportations in 1945, when citizens of German nationality who had remained in the Estonian SSR were sent to Siberia. All 21 remaining German citizens in Pärnu County were deported. A total of 407 people were deported from the Estonian SSR during this deportation, the oldest of whom were Emma Schmidt, 83, and her elder sister Emilie Opitz, 88, who had been deported from Pärnu. Both sisters died in Molotov Oblast in the autumn of the same year and their names are inscribed on the wall of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Maarjamäe, Tallinn. 

Standard project No 1-317-1P 

In 1961, the last part of the former Conrad Grewe’s large property – the plot at the corner of Supeluse and Roosi streets – was separated for the construction of a building with eight apartments for the employees of the Pärnu branch of the Northern High Voltage Networks of the Energy Authority. Officially established in 1960, it was a local subsidiary of the Energy Authority, or “Eesti Energia”, which was responsible for the development of the electrical networks of Pärnu and the repair of possible faults. 

Standard housing project No 1-317-1P was selected for construction, one of the building types that came to be known as Khrushchevkas after Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the USSR at the time and the initiator of the new housing policy. It envisaged the construction of apartment buildings for working-class families with their own living spaces, who until then had often had to share kitchens and bathrooms in cramped communal apartments. In the interests of economy and speed of construction, limits were placed on both the surface area of the apartments and the height of the ceilings. 

The house was built by Pärnu REV. It was handed over to the client on 30 December 1962 and at that time, the address was 16a Nõukogude Street. Although it is a house built according to a standard project, thanks to its white-plastered exterior walls and relatively tolerable dimensions, especially compared to the massive apartment building diagonally across the intersection, the building does not disrupt the overall ambience of Supeluse Street. 

Laying the foundations of the house at Supeluse 20 in 1961, Photo by Harry Loit