The Baltic-style building with the hipped roof at Karusselli 2 is probably one of the oldest surviving buildings in the area, built in the early 19th century. 

The earliest owner of the large property, which at the time also included the land under the current Supeluse 4 and 6, was Nikolai Oltov (Olthoff). His heirs sold the plot in 1896 and it was bought by the former Kihnu priest Konstnantin Rudakow (1852-?) and his wife Anna Andrejevna. In turn, Johann Lasn bought the property from Anna Rudakova in 1917. Preserving the corner shop building, Lasn had a new Art Nouveau-style dwelling (Supeluse 8) built on the plot in 1921 and a small courtyard house in 1927. 

Street corner shop 
The well-located building at the corner has probably always housed a shop. Before World War I, the shop was known as Pumbo’s Shop, owned for a long time by a merchant from Uulu Parish, Aleksander Pumbo (1865-?). Later, the shopkeepers would change, both here and in the Romantsov house (see chapter on Supeluse 10), but the two shops on opposite street corners remained in competition with each other. The rooms beside Pumbo’s Shop were usually rented out to hairdressers – for example, the ladies’ salon M. Grünberg and the hair salon V. Laagus operated here. In 1904, Tõnis Nõmmits announced through the newspaper that he had opened his hairdressing salon next to Pumbo’s Shop in Rudakov’s house. 

A barber turned film director 

Nõmmits has gone down in Estonian history not as a hairdresser, but as the screenwriter and director of “Karujaht Pärnumaal” (“Bear Hunt in Pärnu County”), long considered the first Estonian feature film. 

In 1881, Tõnis Nõmmits (1881-1950) was born as an illegitimate child in Puiatu. He came to Pärnu at the age of just twenty and in 1899, he appeared as an actor in the Pärnu Endla Society’s play “Uhkus tuleb enne langemist” (“Pride Comes Before the Fall”). At the same time, he learned to be a hairdresser and opened his own business in 1904 on the corner of Supeluse and Karusselli streets. 

In 1905, Nõmmits became one of the leading figures in the revolutionary movement here. Soon, he was arrested and detained under investigation in both Pärnu and Pskov. In any case, Nõmmits decided to leave Pärnu after his release and moved to Tartu. There, he opened his hairdressing business and got married to Alide Hablitz (1883-1957) in the Church of St Peter in 1906. 

In Tartu, he met the local cinema owner Aleksander Tippo and the photographer Johannes Pääsuke, with whom he started producing a film. The fact that Nõmmits had to leave Pärnu due to pressure from the local German city leaders and the police chief Hahn was also a clear motive for choosing Pärnu’s political antics as the subject matter. The plot was inspired by the establishment of the Waldhof Pulp Mill in Pärnu, when the city sold the land to the factory for next to nothing. Jaan Karu, a well-known journalist and bookseller in Pärnu, drew a lot of attention to this in his newspaper, as well as to the corruption aspect of Mayor Brackmann himself being among the owners of the factory. The city leaders at the time took Karu to court and the court ordered the journalist to be detained. 

In an interview in 1935, Nõmmits recalls that the film was primarily intended as a political satire. The main character of the film is a person (Frakmann) who resembles the mayor of Pärnu, Brackmann, both in appearance and in name, and who, during a bear hunt, ends up at the bear’s den and gets a good hiding from the bear. As the film was shot and premiered in Tartu (26 February 1914), its satirical nature towards the Germans was initially overlooked, to the extent that the local German newspaper also wrote a laudatory review of the film. It was only some time later, when it was discovered, that the censor ordered almost half of the film to be cut. The film was never officially released in Pärnu. 

Nationalisation 
Both the shop building and the Lasns‘ house were taken away from their daughter Elsa by the Soviet authorities in 1950. The housing authority found new tenants for the apartments, and a bread shop operated in the shop building almost until the end of the Soviet era.