At Poltavskyi Shliakh Street, 44 you can find an old but imposing metal hangar in the courtyards. Few people know that it was built as early as the beginning of the 20th century—it once housed Ludwig Jaffe’s agricultural machinery warehouse.

Among the surviving original details, you can see an elegant little dragon—a bracket for the lantern that illuminated the sign on the warehouse.

However, they didn’t just sell farm equipment here. The hangar housed one of the many car dealerships on Yekaterinoslavskaya Street (now Poltavskyi Shlyakh). The list of cars in the advertisement included Belgian Minervas, German NAGs, and American Overlands, which could be purchased on installment plans.

At the very outset of World War I, in late July 1914, the cars were requisitioned because Ludwig Jaffe was a German citizen.

An interesting fact: among the various equipment and machinery that Yaffe sold was American machinery from McCormick (Chicago). In 1931, the McCormick-Deering 15/30 tractor would roll off the assembly line at the Kharkiv Tractor Plant as its first model.