Moskovsky railway station (former Nikolaevsky) and Vosstaniya square (Znamenskaya) have always been the main gates to St. Petersburg. And I want to start a series of my historical photo stories with a story about Vosstaniya Square.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the place now called Vosstaniya Square was the crossroads of the Great Perspective (the future Nevsky Prospect) and the old Novgorod road along the line of which the Ligovsky Canal was dug in 1718-1725 to supply water to the fountains of the Summer Garden.
From 1744 to 1778, behind the Ligovsky canal, on the site of the modern hotel "Oktyabrskaya", the royal bird, huntsman and elephant courtyard was located. Next to the square was a street along which exotic inhabitants of the nursery were taken to swim to the Neva, which had been called the Slonovaya for more than 150 years, until it became part of Suvorovsky Prospect. Unfortunately, I could not find images of the elephant courtyard.
The first building on the site of the modern square was the wooden Church of the Sign, built at the behest of Elizaveta Petrovna in 1765-1767.
From 1794 to 1804, according to the project of the architect F. I. Demertsov, a new stone church was erected. The main chapel was consecrated in the name of the Lord's entrance to Jerusalem, the side ones - in the name of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker and the Sign of the Mother of God.
Promotional video:
In the 1840s, the architect N. E. Efimov developed a plan for the layout of Znamenskaya Square. This project was implemented as part of the construction in 1847-1851 of the Nikolaevsky (now Moscow) railway station, designed by K. A. Tones.
The opposite side of the square in 1845-1851 was designed by the building of the Znamenskaya Hotel, which was later called "Severnaya", "Bolshaya Severnaya", and after the revolution became "October".
In the picture above, in addition to the hotel and the station, you can also see the fence and the chapel of the Znamenskaya church erected in 1809 and the tower of the Karetnaya part of the congress house built by the architect Krasnopevkov in 1846-1850.
Since 1863, a passenger horse-drawn railway begins to operate along the Ligovsky Canal.
And in 1882-1884 the first steam trams began to operate in St. Petersburg, including along the embankment of the Ligovsky Canal.
In 1908 (in St. Petersburg since 1907) the first electric tram appeared (route 6) from the Znamenskaya Church along Suvorovsky to Perevoz on the Neva.
Also in the above pictures you can see the dome on the roof of the hotel, erected in 1900 by the architect A. S. Khrenov.
On May 23, 1909, an equestrian monument to Emperor Alexander III was unveiled in the center of the square (sculptor P. P. Trubetskoy, architect F. O. Shekhtel). The site of the monument is associated with the merits of Alexander III as the founder of the Siberian railway route from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok.
Immediately after the opening, the monument received the most controversial reviews, from enthusiastic to harshly critical. They said that this was a mockery of the autocracy, that it was unacceptable to sculpt the Tsar in the form of a fat blockhead with a dull look from under frowning eyebrows, sitting on an equally fat, leaning horse. The poems that are still alive today went for a walk around the city:
There is a chest of drawers on the square
On the dresser is a hippo
On a hippopotamus - a moron
There is a hat on the flap.
On November 17, 1918, the square on which large-scale events and manifestations of the February Revolution unfolded in 1917, was renamed the Uprising Square.
On December 29, 1918, a monument to Sophia Perovskaya was opened in front of the Nikolaevsky railway station. Futurist Griselli sculpted a terrorist in the form of a mighty lioness. As contemporaries wrote, on the monument Perovskaya was depicted "… with a huge hairdo, with powerful forms of the face and neck." This so amazed and offended those present that in April 1919, by order of the Petrograd Soviet, the monument was removed.
After the 1917 revolution, the monument to Alexander III did not go unnoticed. As soon as he was not scolded: and a scarecrow, and a beast, and a moron … In 1919, the quatrain of Demyan Bedny was carved on a granite pedestal:
My son and my father were executed during their lifetime, And I took the lot of posthumous disgrace:
I'm sticking here with a cast-iron scarecrow for the country, Ever thrown off the yoke of autocracy.
In 1927, on the tenth anniversary of October, the monument was used for the festive decoration of the square: it was enclosed in a metal cage, and next to it was a helical tower, a wheel, and two masts on which a hammer and sickle and the inscription "USSR" were hung.
In 1937, under the pretext of reconstructing Vosstaniya Square and laying tram lines along Nevsky Prospect, the monument was removed to the storerooms.
The revolutionary events did not pass by the Big North Hotel. In the 1920s, a city hostel of the proletariat was organized in the hotel, where all the Petrograd street children were taken. Among the inhabitants of the city, the word "gopniks" appeared, which was used to refer to the inhabitants of the GOP from Ligovka.
During the NEP years, life in Leningrad began to improve, hotels began to be sorely lacking in 1930, but under the new name "Oktyabrskaya", the hotel, restored in a constructivist style (architect AI Gegello), reopened.
On Ligovsky Prospect, right behind the hotel building, there was a tram pavilion combined with a public restroom.
During the Great Patriotic War, the pavilion was converted into a bunker.
The same fortification was erected at the corner of Vosstaniya Street and Nevsky Prospect.
But already in 1944, the fortifications were dismantled.
After the war, on the site of the Church of the Sign, dismantled in 1941, a public garden was broken for a short time, where one of the Tomon's fountains was moved from Pulkovskoye Highway (the one that was later located in Victory Park, and now on Sennaya Square).
It should be noted that there was a project for the partial preservation of the church with its subsequent rebuilding under the building of the Leningrad Promstroyproekt.
Since 1949, on the site of the park, work began on the construction of the ground entrance hall of the Ploschad Vosstaniya metro station.
On November 15, 1955, as part of the first stage of the metro, the Ploschad Vosstaniya metro station was opened, made in the form of a round building with attached risalits and crowned with a rotunda with a spire.
In 1952, a public garden was laid out on Vosstaniya Square. And in 1957, a foundation stone was installed in it, in the place of which it was planned to erect a monument to V. I. Lenin. (the monument was never installed).
In the 1970s, for the 60th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, a new reconstruction of the hotel was carried out. The building was partially restored to its historical appearance (architect A. M. Rodionov).
In 1985, to the fortieth anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, designed by architects V. S. Lukyanov and A. I. Alymov in the center of the square was installed a 360-ton granite Obelisk "To the Hero-City of Leningrad".
In the foreground is the architect Lukyanov
The history of Ploschad Vosstaniya is closely related to the history of St. Petersburg, and next time arriving in the city at the Moskovsky railway station or just walking at the intersection of Nevsky and Ligovsky avenues, stop for a minute and try to look at the city through the prism of historical changes, and perhaps you can see something. something new.