Nevsky Prospekt

The name, and a folk etymology worth killing

Older accounts explain that the name, translated, "really just means Neva Avenue". It does not. The road was driven through marshland to reach the Alexander Nevsky monastery at its eastern end, and it is named after the monastery. The monastery in turn is named after Alexander Nevsky, whose epithet comes from the Battle of the Neva in 1240. The river is in there, but two steps back.

The names it has actually carried:

• Bolshaya Pershpektiva — the Great Perspective Road — until 1738
• Nevskaya Perspektiva — from 1738 to the 1780s
• Prospekt 25-go Oktyabrya — 25 October Avenue — through the Soviet period
• Nevsky Prospekt again, restored in January 1944, in the wave of historic names returned during the war

Where it begins and ends

Older accounts place the avenue between the Admiralty and the Moscow railway station, which amputates its eastern end. It runs from the Admiralty in the west to Alexander Nevsky Square in the east, where it meets the monastery — about four and a half kilometres, not the five that older accounts give, and nothing like the three miles they convert it into.

Moskovsky station is at number 85, roughly halfway along, on Vosstaniya Square. The stretch beyond it, out to Alexander Nevsky Square, has always been called Staro-Nevsky — Old Nevsky — and is still treated as a separate district with its own character and its own rents.

It was not laid out in a single act. Two roads were cut in the 1710s, one inland from the Admiralty and one out from the monastery, and joined to the old Novgorod road; the whole was a single route by about 1718 or 1719, planted with birches and partly cobbled in the early 1720s. The original width survives in the stretch between the Moika and the Admiralty.

The buildings, by number

Older accounts get several of the addresses wrong, which matters on a street where the numbers are how everything is identified.

• No. 17 — the Stroganov Palace. Rastrelli, 1753–54, late Baroque, not 1760; the interiors were remodelled in neoclassical taste by Voronikhin. The Stroganovs owned it until 1918, and it has been a branch of the Russian Museum since 1988.
• No. 18 — the Kotomin House, rebuilt by Vasily Stasov between 1812 and 1815. The confectionery of Wolff and Béranger occupied the ground floor, and on 27 January 1837 Pushkin stopped there on his way to the duel, meeting his second; he was mortally wounded less than an hour later. Older accounts say only that Pushkin is "said to have frequented" the place, which is the weak form of a far better fact. The Literaturnoye Kafe on the site is a themed restaurant opened in 1983, not a surviving Pushkin-era café.
• No. 25 — the Kazan Cathedral, by Andrey Voronikhin, begun in 1801 and consecrated in 1811. The 96 granite columns older accounts mention are real, but they are the northern colonnade, the one facing the avenue, in four rows; a further 56 Corinthian columns stand inside. It was the Soviet Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism from 1932, resumed services in 1992, and is now the mother cathedral of the city's metropolis.
• No. 28 — the Singer House, not the cathedral. Older accounts put the Kazan Cathedral here, which is across the road.
• Nos. 40–42 — St Catherine's Armenian Apostolic Church, by Yury Felten, built from 1771 and consecrated in February 1780. Older accounts give 1780 as the completion date, conflating the two.
• No. 33 — the City Duma tower, which older accounts render as the "Doema Tower". It is by Giacomo Ferrari, built about 1799–1804, and it had three working lives: an optical semaphore telegraph station from the 1830s until electric telegraphy replaced it in 1854, a fire watchtower from 1835, and a chiming clock installed in 1884.
• No. 56 — the Yeliseyev Brothers' shop. Here older accounts are right about the number and wrong about the date: it is by Gavriil Baranovsky and was built in 1902–03, not completed in 1906. The allegorical figures of Industry, Commerce, Art and Science on the façade are by Amandus Adamson.

On the Yeliseyev interior, older accounts promise gilded ceilings, enormous crystal chandeliers and stained glass. The stained glass is the real thing — the façade is effectively one vast shop window with a glass "tree of life" arch — along with mosaic, plant-motif plasterwork and openwork grilles. Much of the rest has not survived, the chandeliers belong to the theatre hall on the floor above, now the Akimov Comedy Theatre, and no source supports the gilded ceilings. The shop itself was Gastronom No. 1 in the Soviet period and reopened in March 2012 after a decade of restoration, with mechanical window figures designed by Mikhail Shemyakin and built by British engineers.

Two more corrections. The Mertens House, which is the other building on the avenue usually described as spectacular, is at No. 21, by Marian Lyalevich, 1911–12, and is neo-Renaissance rather than Art Nouveau; it housed the first Soviet fashion house from 1944. And No. 15 is the Chicherin House of 1768–71, standing where Rastrelli's temporary wooden Winter Palace had been and where Elizabeth died — but the building there today is a reconstruction of 2007–08, now a hotel. Gorky's House of Arts occupied the original from 1919 to 1923; Alexander Grin wrote Scarlet Sails in it, and the poet Gumilyov was arrested in it in 1921.

The Singer House, which was never anyone's house

Older accounts call No. 28 the former Singer Mansion, "once home of the sewing machine magnate". It was never a home and he never saw it. It was built in 1902–04 by Pavel Suzor as the Russian headquarters of the Singer Sewing Machine Company — offices above, a columned showroom at the main floor, the rest let to banks and commercial firms. Isaac Singer died in 1875, twenty-seven years before the first stone.

The glass tower and glass globe older accounts admire exist because of a planning dispute. The company wanted a tower block; the city's height code forbade it, so Suzor substituted a glazed corner turret with a glass globe sculpted by Amandus Adamson. A bronze eagle beneath the globe disappeared in the 1920s and was recreated in the 2003 restoration.

Nationalised in 1917 and given to the state publishing house in 1919, the building has been Dom Knigi — the House of the Book — since 1938, and stayed open through most of the siege. It is still the city's best-known bookshop, and since 2010 the upper floors have housed the offices of the social network VKontakte.

The Anichkov bridge and palace

Older accounts spell the name three different ways on one page, and none of them is right. It is Anichkov, after Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Anichkov, whose engineering battalion built the first timber crossing of the Fontanka here in 1716.

The four sculptural groups are by Pyotr Klodt, and they are not "four statues of men on horses": they are four stages of a man on foot taming a horse, which is the whole subject. Their history is messier than it looks — two earlier pairs were given away as diplomatic gifts, to Prussia in 1842 and to Naples in 1846, and Klodt cast replacements, so the set as it now stands was completed in 1851. In the war the groups were taken down and buried in the garden of the Anichkov Palace, returning to their plinths in June 1945. A shell scar was deliberately left unrepaired on one pedestal and marked with a plaque in 1972. The bridge itself is dealt with elsewhere.

The Anichkov Palace behind it was built for Elizabeth between 1741 and 1754 — not 1750 — and its architect is genuinely uncertain, with Rastrelli and Zemtsov both named and neither substantiated. Starov remodelled it for Potemkin in the 1770s and Quarenghi added the range along Nevsky. It became the Palace of Pioneers in 1934 and is still a children's institution, now the city's Palace of Youth Creativity, so it is a working building rather than a sight.

The inscription at number 14

Older accounts mention, almost in passing, a sign on the wall at No. 14 warning of air raids. It is the most visited object on the avenue and deserves better than a clause.

The building is School No. 210, by Boris Rubanenko, built in 1939 — reportedly in fifty-four days. On its wall, stencilled on a blue ground, is the sentence:

Граждане! При артобстреле эта сторона улицы наиболее опасна — "Citizens! During shelling this side of the street is the most dangerous." Three things older accounts miss. It is not a warning about air raids but about artillery: the German guns were to the south-west, and No. 14 is on the northern, even-numbered side, the exposed one. The wording was painted by civil-defence workers in autumn 1941, and removed after the war. And what is on the wall now is a recreation of 1962, made on the initiative of the poet Mikhail Dudin, with a commemorative plaque beside it recording that the inscription is preserved in memory of the city's endurance. It is registered with the State Museum of Urban Sculpture, it was vandalised twice in November 2018 and restored, and queues form at it every 27 January.

A handful of these inscriptions survive elsewhere in the city and in Kronstadt, with slightly different wording; accounts differ on how many. Older accounts also say No. 14 is one of only three buildings on the avenue put up since 1917, which cannot be substantiated.

What the avenue sells now

Older accounts treat Nevsky as a shopping street and compare it to Michigan Avenue and Fifth Avenue. The comparison is a period piece, and the composition of the street has since inverted.

Great Gostiny Dvor, at the Sadovaya corner, is still there and still takes the whole block — Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe, built between 1757 and 1785, on a cheaper neoclassical scheme that replaced a rejected design by Rastrelli, with over a kilometre of frontage. What has changed is everything in it and around it. Western chains left after 2022 and were replaced by domestic successor labels operating out of the same premises: the Zara flagship in the Mertens House became Maag in April 2023, the Starbucks outlets became Stars Coffee, and a Russian brand took the former Louis Vuitton space. Premium and luxury operators have given way to more affordable formats; food and drink now occupies about a third of the retail space on the avenue, more than fashion. Vacancy on the main stretch is low and on Staro-Nevsky considerably higher, and through 2024 to 2026 much of the street has been behind scaffolding for a façade restoration programme.

The honest summary is not that the street has declined but that it has changed function: fewer shops, more restaurants, and almost no foreign fascias.

Trams, and a pedestrian street that keeps not happening

Nevsky Prospekt is not pedestrianised and never has been. It carries cars, buses and trolleybuses, and remains a through route. Trams ran on it until 1951, when they were removed; proposals to pedestrianise the avenue and bring the tram back have recurred for well over a decade and have not got past renderings, with transport engineers repeatedly calling the schemes underdeveloped. It is closed to traffic only for specific days — New Year, Victory Day on 9 May, City Day on 27 May, religious processions and major conferences.

Six metro stations serve it: Admiralteyskaya (whose entrance is a block off the avenue), Nevsky Prospekt, Gostiny Dvor, Mayakovskaya, Ploshchad Vosstaniya and Ploshchad Alexandra Nevskogo. The first of them opened in the 1960s, which is why older accounts, working from material written before that, describe the avenue as a place to be driven along rather than arrived at.