Sadovaya Street

One of the oldest streets in St Petersburg runs almost four kilometres from the Field of Mars to Pokrovskaya Square and is lined for nearly its whole length with commercial buildings: Vallin de la Mothe's Gostiny Dvor, Apraksin Dvor, the largest market in the city, the Nikolsky Market, Quarenghi's Assignation Bank. At the very beginning it skirts the Mikhailovsky Castle, where Paul I was murdered, and further on it passes the main building of the Public Library at the corner of Nevsky. The street took its name from the gardens of the estates along which it was laid in the 1730s, but it stopped being a garden street very quickly — trade squeezed out everything else. The through arcades of these yards work as covered galleries: you can walk along them for blocks without stepping out into the rain. On its way Sadovaya touches Sennaya Square, the old market of the city, and the Yusupov Garden, where in the 19th century one of the country's first public skating rinks was flooded, the first Russian figure-skating contests were held and Nikolai Panin-Kolomenkin, Russia's future first Olympic champion, trained. A tram line has survived on the roadway — a rarity for the centre, where the rails have been taken up almost everywhere.

On the map