There are worthy competitors in beauty at the Bolsheokhtinsky bridge, but no one will challenge its primacy as the most interesting and original. So say, at least, St. Petersburg residents.
Background
Peter the Great Bridge in St. Petersburg is not the first of the constant city crossings. The issue of its construction has been raised in the city government since 1880, but was postponed, in particular, due to the resistance of the then influential water transportation community.
In 1885, the Okhta suburb was annexed to St. Petersburg, but only formally, since without the constant crossing the economic management of the territory for the capital authorities remained unfeasible. The population of Okhta was growing rapidly (from 1869 to 1900 - by 20 thousand people), industry and trade were expanding. In addition to traditional shipbuilding and timber processing enterprises appeared here: weaving, for the processing of cast iron, for the production of asbestos and paints.
Two large shipping shipments could not cope with the increased volumes of food and consumer goods, raw materials and finished products. The construction of the bridge became an urgent need, and in 1900 the development of a program for competitive projects began. The area of Malaya Okhta was chosen as the construction site.
Bolsheokhtinsky bridge in St. Petersburg: the history of construction
A year later, a competitive design assignment was prepared. One of the points of its most important conditions was the presence of a railroad track for horse and steam traction. In 1901, the commission announced an international competition. 16 domestic and foreign works were submitted for the best project. None of them met the necessary technical requirements, and the competition committee rejected them all. The project was approved by two military engineers: Professor Grigory Grigoryevich Krivoshein and his co-author Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Apyshkov.
It took six years for corrections and improvements before the project was adopted (1907). Its author, George Krivoshein, was to lead the construction process.
In 1909, on June 27, a celebration was held on the occasion of laying the bridge and naming it in honor of Emperor Peter the Great. A Warsaw company signed a three-year construction contract, an adjustable span mechanism was obligated to manufacture a metal plant in St. Petersburg.
By the fall of 1911 the crossing was ready. On October 26, after the opening ceremony, the bridge was put into operation, and until 1971 it served without any repairs.
Post-revolutionary renaming of the Bolsheokhtinsky bridge
The bridge of Peter the Great on the plan of Petrograd in 1917 was listed as Okhtensky, then in the post-revolutionary power it was called Bolsheokhtensky, and since 1956, due to innovations in spelling, it was called Bolsheokhtinsky.
During the period of large-scale repairs of 1993-1996, the initial outline of the “Emperor Peter the Great Bridge” with dates on the sides was reconstructed on flights: 1908 and 1911. There were rumors among Petersburgers that the crossing is now called the Peter the Great Bridge, and the former Bolsheokhtinsky bridge was renamed since 1991 . This is an unfortunate mistake: in the named year, the historical name was returned to Trinity Bridge. But, despite the official name in the maps and documentation, the name Bolsheokhtinsky, it is called the original name in honor of the founder of the city.
Global repair
The large-scale reconstruction of the 1990s took longer than building the entire bridge. But the work carried out is colossal. The lifting mechanisms, the electro-hydraulic drive and the metal structures of the adjustable span are completely replaced; instead of 25 thousand leaky rivets, high-strength bolts are mounted . Tens of thousands of square meters of old coating, peeled to a metal base, covered with asphalt. Thousands of tons of metal structures, cubic meters of concrete, the square of granite cladding needed to repair the Peter the Great Bridge in St. Petersburg are being calculated.
Not without incidents. When they made a test layout of the almost repaired bridge, the paved asphalt simply moved to the side spans from the smooth surface of the wings. I had to lay the canvas on the adjustable span repeatedly, and so that it does not slip, reinforcement was welded onto the metal base of the wings.
Other changes
Since 2000, the Peter the Great Bridge in St. Petersburg has been effectively illuminated by 1300 powerful lamps. The tram service discontinued since 2005 increased transport capacity, but the final dismantling of the rail ended only by the end of 2010.
Petersburg bridge and Paris tower
During the construction period and after the opening of the bridge, most contemporaries considered its shape to be crude, not corresponding to the look of elegant Petersburg. But Parisians considered such a tower the Eiffel Tower, which is 22 years older than the Bolsheokhtinsky building. The similarity of such heterogeneous objects does not end there. They have a special beauty that descendants appreciated. Bulky parts with multi-row rivets are connected in an ordered light pattern. This weave of metal with its geometric consistency enchants and makes both designs very similar.
It is very likely that Krivoshein visited Paris and got acquainted with the construction of the Gustave Eiffel tower . As a bridge engineer Grigory Grigoryevich, the other constructions of the French designer, especially his bridges, could not help but be interested. If you observe the completed projects of Krivoshein and Eiffel, you can see their similarity in a simple openwork weaving of metal.
Comparison with Tower
The bridge of Emperor Peter the Great in St. Petersburg was compared with his London counterpart, built seventeen years earlier. Tower - also a movable, three-span metal bridge mounted on stone supports. But its towers, which are two times higher than the Bolsheokhtinsky ones, also performed the function of a pedestrian crossing when the wings of the span were spread. However, it was these quadrangular structures, similar to serfdom, that gave rise to compare two unusual structures.
But this is not all that akin St. Petersburg and London bridges. In the film “Treasures of Agra” (1983) from the domestic series about Sherlock Holmes, Bolsheokhtinsky “played” the Tower Bridge, and Neva - the Thames. Having found the necessary angles, adding fog with a smoke machine and shooting in white nights, filmmakers reproduced on the Leningrad embankment a semblance of London.
Where are the moose from?
Among the archival photographs, you can see an old photograph, in which, among a crowd of people curious, a moose wanders across the Peter the Great Bridge in St. Petersburg. In the surrounding swamp forests there were many of these animals. Sometimes, some of them swam to the area of Malaya Okhta, where they found a gentle descent near the bridge, convenient to climb ashore. Sometimes people had to help stray animals get out to land.
Bolsheokhtinsky treasure
And the last story about this design, included in the list of St. Petersburg legends: a gold rivet. When and why such rumors appeared - no one knows. Allegedly, builders or designers had one precious rivet laid at random. To prevent it being discovered, the part was covered with a thin layer of ordinary metal. And always, since the discovery of this object, there have been many eccentrics trying to find among a million identical the only hidden rivet.