The district was inhabited by working class people and had an industrial character. Mechanical mills, an iron foundry, a lamp factory, tanneries, a tobacco factory and a chicory drying kiln were located here. The plant that stood out among them was the Kośminek Vodka and Liqueur Factory, located at 3 Garbarska Street, the biggest Polish producer of kosher vodka, the so-called pejsachówka, or Pessach (Passover) plum vodka. The factory belonged to the Zylber family. Hersz Jojna Zylber also co-owned a brewery, located at 106 Bychawska Street, which produced the Jeleń (Polish for “deer”) beer, named after the owner (Hersz, or Hirsh, is Yiddish for “deer”).The atmosphere of the quarter was so characteristic that contemporary writer Marcin Wroński has made it the setting of his crime stories taking place in interwar Lublin. A part of the story of The Magician of Lublin is also set in the Piaski district. The book was written by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), a laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature.