Over the nine centuries of its existence, the bowels of Moscow have been dug to great depths many times. Of the well-known Moscow dungeons, except for the semi-legendary Metro-2 and the library of Ivan the Terrible, one can name the Neglinka River chained in stone and the basement system of an apartment building on Solyanka. To inspect the latter, I invite my readers today. It is undoubtedly worth starting the story with a short excursion into history.
In the 16th century, at the corner of "the street from the Barbarian Gate to the Ivanovsky Monastery" and "the big street to the Yauzsky Gate", the rich merchant Nikitnikov established the Salt Fish Yard. Here they stored and traded salt and its special grade - potash (potassium carbonate), as well as salted fish. The ensemble had a vast courtyard with warehouses (barns) and shops. The main gate was marked by a high tower with a guardhouse, and next to it there was another, small gate. There were no street windows on the ground floor - to protect against thieves. The shops had separate entrances. The salt storage barns were built with vaults supported by powerful pillars. They probably had a basement floor, which was not inferior in area to the aboveground one.
Years later, the nearby streets acquired the names - Solyanka and Bolshoi Ivanovsky Lane (in 1961 it was renamed Zabelina Street). In 1912, the dilapidated barns and shops of the former Salt Yard began to be dismantled for the construction of a tenement house. When they began to dig a pit, they found a treasure. The jugs contained 13 poods (about 200 kg, almost half a million pieces) of coins from the reign of Ivan the Terrible, Fyodor Ioannovich and Boris Godunov. The coins, apparently, were the proceeds of the Salt Yard for a certain period, hidden and forgotten during the Time of Troubles. In the process of avariciously sharing this wealth, a construction contractor was injured. The policeman who came to the noise seized only 13 pounds (7 kg, 9 thousand coins), but they were later returned to the discoverers, after being examined by the Archaeological Commission.
For the construction of houses, the Moscow Merchant Company bought a plot of irregular shape from different owners and announced a competition for the best project. A group of architects won: V. V. Sherwood, I. A. German and A. E. Sergeev. They did what the developers wanted: they used the intricate shape of the site as closely as possible, expanded the building both upward and downward. The house in the neoclassical style was decorated with stucco molding, incongruously overlooking the courtyards-wells; inside there are luxury apartments with windows to the same.
But the most interesting feature of the house is hidden from prying eyes. This is an incredible basement with high vaults, wide corridors where two cars can easily pass, and many interior spaces. The Modellmix group has made a magnificent model of one of the buildings of the house together with the entire basement on a scale of 1: 100. For whom this model was made and where it is now is unknown, but the photographs give an idea of the grandeur of the underground part of the house.
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And this is how the basement looks in comparison with the surrounding landscape. It occupies the entire space under the buildings of the house, courtyards and a wide internal passage.
The car entrance is located in the eastern part of the basement. Inside, wide tunnels are laid, into which innumerable halls, rooms and closets open out with doorways. In the depths of the basement labyrinths, various staircases to the upper floors of the house are hidden.
After the revolution, the house passed into the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat of Railways. In the 1970s-1980s, the basement of the house was used as a garage for police cars, but due to high humidity, they quickly fell into disrepair. During Perestroika, the garages were given to the residents of the houses, and in the 1990s hucksters settled here, interrupting the numbers and dismantling the stolen cars. In 2002, two diggers drew up a rough basement plan. If you compare it with the above diagram, you can see how few rooms they managed to describe, but the efforts of the guys undoubtedly deserve praise.
There are also photos of visiting Solyanka in 2002. Then part of the system was flooded to the ankles, wrecked cars were everywhere, and the entrance was carried out through the broken lattice of the car entrance. It was possible to get inside without any problems, which was used by numerous diggers, gamers, homeless people and all sorts of alcoholics.
And this is how the car entrance looks like in 2014. After another arson in one of the squats, the patience of the local communal services was overflowing and they welded the notorious grate with metal sheets. Since then, the login has been very difficult.
Temporary lighting has been thrown inside. A wide ramp slopes down to basement level.
At the end of the ramp is the first fork, where several tunnels converge.
The vault of the vast hall is supported by a massive column. Brick walls, steel beams and reinforced concrete floors - construction technologies of the early 20th century.
We will leave the walk along the wide corridors for the end of the story, and now we will delve into the labyrinths of basements.
The basement walls are about a meter thick, but in many places thin brick partitions have been erected, crushing the halls into small closets and nooks, littered with perennial debris.
Often, walled up openings come across in the ceiling. Some of them were used for natural lighting in the basement, some for the delivery of goods.
Although the hucksters have not been found in Solyanka for a long time, here and there the twisted skeletons of rotting cars have been preserved.
Most garages are abandoned along with the property that filled them.
Of course, no lighting has survived here.
In some places, the basement was divided into two lower tiers, where warehouses and workshops were located.
Stairs to the upper floors are common, now mostly covered.
An interesting part of the system is several rooms recently rented and refurbished by a certain company.
All communications were brought here, office furniture was installed. Naturally, working in this crypt without sunlight turned out to be extremely uncomfortable, and soon the premises were empty. The last time people appeared here was on New Year's Eve.
To prevent the premises from disappearing, as well as to avoid coordination with the architectural commission, the company installed external units of its air conditioners here.
However, there is also a "dark" side of Solyanka. Here, as in any other basement, numerous communications of the house converge. The sewerage system is in emergency condition, so the system is flooded with waste water. In one of the rooms, the following picture was discovered: someone is taking a shower upstairs, and water is merrily pouring into the hall from the bell of a rusty pipe. It smells like soap and shampoos, almost like in a bathroom, if you do not take into account the persistent "aroma" of faeces, flushed into the basement earlier.
There are also numerous communications with cold and hot water. Due to the constant leaks of worn-out pipes, the floor is flooded to the ankle in places, you can only move through the mountains of garbage.
Pipes run through the entire system.
In the center, communication systems are connected to form a huge heat node.
When putting things in order, the garbage from the basement was almost never taken out, but only shoveled by a bulldozer into distant rooms.
As a result, the corridors are relatively clean, while the passage to the side rooms is blocked by mountains of bricks mixed with bottles.
The view of the long tunnels with arched openings is a majestic sight.
The light bulbs hanging here and there create an atmosphere of mystery.
In the concrete vault, light windows were provided, in the cells of which special prisms were installed, scattering sunlight.
The windows overlooked the roadway, now they are asphalted, the prisms are broken and lost.
From the water dripping from the arch, ice stalagmites form on the floor, “reverse icicles”.
The main corridor ends in a huge opening lined with steel cabinets.
Behind them is a vast hall with a viewing pit. Judging by the garland, it was once a great time to celebrate the New Year. Now only a well-known St. Petersburg researcher of abandoned objects can get into the frame.
Not far from Zabelina Street, the corridor turns at right angles towards Solyanka.
From this point, hardly half of the system can be seen through.
The basements of Solyanka are a unique engineering object of their time and a historical monument. It could make, for example, an excellent exhibition space: a gallery of modern art or a historical museum. True, this will require huge investments: for tens of years, the basements were abandoned, most of the side rooms are littered with garbage and flooded with water. Major repairs are needed, but who will do it and at whose expense is not clear yet.
And for us, our time in this amazing place has come to an end. Having made the last shot, we threw ourselves into legal space, dissolving in the evening crowd of tired townspeople.