Novy Arbat is a street located in the same district in the Central Administrative District of the capital of Russia. It stretches from the square of the Arbat Gate (from there begins the numbering of buildings) to the square of Free Russia.
origin of name
St. The New Arbat was conceived by the designers before the Great Patriotic War. Thus, the master plan for the reconstruction of the capital, which appeared in 1935, provided for the laying of a new city highway from Arbat Square to Dorogomilovskaya Zastava, connecting the center of Moscow with residential new buildings in its western part. The indicated highway at its very beginning was supposed to run parallel to the already existing Arbat street, which is why New Arbat became the working version of the name. In addition, this site was called the prospectus of the Constitution. Unfortunately, the war did not allow to realize all these plans. They returned to them only in the sixties.
In 1963, the site merged into a single highway from the Garden Ring to Arbat Square, part of Kutuzovsky Prospekt and ul. Kalinin. The specified zone became known as Kalinin Avenue, named after Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin. Muscovites themselves used the unofficial name for the site between the Garden Ring and Arbat Square - Novy Arbat. This option was documented in 1994.
Significant Events
In the tunnel under Novy Arbat, during the August coup (events of 1991), three people were killed. In memory of the tragedy that occurred, a memorial sign was later installed.
On March 10, 2010, Novy Arbat became the venue for a popular rally "For Fair Elections". According to various estimates, from ten to twenty-five thousand people became its participants. Crowds of people moved along the odd side of the street, while traffic did not overlap.
Architectural features
Architects Tkhor, Posokhin, Makarevich, Mdoyants, Airapetov, Popova, Pokrovsky and Zaitseva worked on the ensemble of the site in question in 1962-1968. Thanks to their efforts, a new voluminous fragment of the capital’s environment appeared, in which everything was subordinated to a single idea - from the basic orientation of the space structure to advertising and elements of improvement.
On the northern (even) side there is a dotted line of five residential buildings. Each of them has twenty-four floors, the building material is frame panels, the number of apartments is 176. These structures are similar to each other as twins. It was assumed that representatives of the creative intelligentsia and high-ranking Soviet officials would live in grandiose buildings. On the first two floors of the houses are cafes and shops. In between the high towers, two-story buildings have been erected, including the Book House and the Oktyabr movie theater. New Arbat, thanks to such a decision, became even more contrasting. However, not everyone considers this a plus.
But what is located on the southern (odd) side of Novy Arbat street (Moscow)? This site is occupied by twenty-six administrative buildings. They are connected by a continuous plane of an eight-hundred-meter stylobate. It has two underground and ground floors. They serve for the entrance halls of administrative buildings and a large shopping center.
The construction of the odd side is characterized by the most modern level of organization and maintenance of its time. Mutual interference in the implementation of the trade and administrative functions of buildings does not occur, the separation is made with the necessary clarity. Architects have proposed an effective solution to the issue of unloading goods in stores located in buildings. For this, a tunnel of 1 km long and 9 m wide was built along the entire length of this building. Entrances are from the side of two lanes and from the ends. This does not violate the usual course of life of the local population and creates comfortable conditions for the employees of the shopping center.
Current state of affairs
Currently, Novy Arbat (Moscow) can not yet be called a completed project. So, the left over from the old buildings buildings, sometimes even their rear sides, go onto this street from both sides, which in no way fits into the look of the modern highway. Houses on Novy Arbat, erected in the late XIX - early XX century, rise above the shopping center on the south side and protrude between the 2nd, 3rd and 4th towers on the north. Their forms in the general ensemble are random in nature, but at the same time they provide a sense of habitability, which is so lacking in modern buildings. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, houses No. 14, 18, 21, 21a, 23 were reconstructed. Currently they have a representative appearance.
The territory from the Garden Ring to the Novoarbatsky Bridge
The laying of this part of the street was carried out in 1957, but its unique appearance is still being formed. The indicated territory of Novy Arbat has been in the process of development since the 1920s (that is, even before planning for the construction of the highway), which cannot be said about the main section, formed over a decade on an integral project.
First step
The initial stage of the formation of this part of the street occurred in 1920-1960. Two residential buildings were erected in Bolshoi Novinsky Lane. Their current address is Moscow, ul. New Arbat, 23 and 25.
In the 1930s, the building of the Institute of Balneology and Physiotherapy appeared. After laying a new highway, this building was on its red line.
In 1940, a residential building was erected on the corner of the future New Arbat and Smolenskaya embankment. The author of this project is architect A. Schusev. Two houses at the intersection with the Garden Ring, which were the beginning of this section of the planned highway, appeared in the 1950s. From 1963 to 1970, the construction of the CMEA building continued, and then for almost thirty years the appearance of the famous street did not change.
Second stage
The end of the 1990s is considered to be a new stage in the formation of a section from the Garden Ring to the Novoarbatsky Bridge . On the odd side there are residential complexes “Novy Arbat 27” and “Arbat Tower” (29th house). In 2006, the construction of the Institute of Balneology took a multifunctional complex called "New Arbat 32".
Project Evaluation
The creation of the New Arbat is the largest reconstruction process within the inner regions of Moscow, carried out in the 60s of the twentieth century. As a result, an extensive spatial system was created along the highway, a new monolithic element of the urban environment appeared, which entered the structure of the capital and set the basic tone for its further transformations.
According to the famous architectural historian Andrei Ikonnikov, the large-scale ensemble of New Arbat is distinguished by its character and special strength. These properties are most pronounced when viewing street panoramas from the embankment to them. Taras Shevchenko. But in the landscapes, revealing from a high plateau in the southwestern part of the capital and along the branch of the bend of the Moscow River, Crimean and Bersenevskaya embankment, Novy Arbat crashes like a huge wall of skyscrapers. Because of this flat ridge, the importance of high-rise buildings of the 50s of the XX century is reduced, due to which the architectural silhouette of the city had a special picturesque appearance. The new street, making its way through the historical canvas of the capital, in no way connected with the nearby buildings, caused only dislike among Muscovites. The writer Y. Nagibin even compared New Arbat with the false jaw of Moscow. The humiliating nickname was liked by the townspeople and became popular. An architectural guide to the capital, published in 1997, notes that three decades after the completion of work, the avenue continues to bring an imbalance to the structure of Moscow. From the adjacent embankments and from the southwestern region of the city, the elements of the development of the avenue look like foreign bodies.
But even despite the fact that many historical buildings were transformed in the process of creating New Arbat, this project allowed preserving parts of some Moscow streets, primarily Arbat, to be preserved.
Transport
The traffic on the street is trafficless, two-way. Opposite sides of the street at its different segments are connected by six underground passages. There are no ground crossings. In the initial version of the project, it was planned to separate the traffic flows from the pedestrian masses, but this idea was not implemented.
"Tasty" New Arbat
Restaurants located on this street make it possible to taste dishes of different cuisines of the world. Among the most famous are Navruz, Peking Duck, Zu, Yakitoria and Tropicana. The longest story is at the Prague restaurant. He first opened his doors to visitors in 1872.
New Arbat: shops
During the Soviet Union, supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets located on Kalininsky Prospekt, such as Novoarbatsky, Voentorg, Moskvichka and Vesna, opened the wonderful world of scarce goods to Muscovites and guests of the capital.
Even without a reputation as the main shopping street (like Tverskaya), nowadays Novy Arbat is very popular. Investors often fight for the opportunity to have invaluable commercial real estate on this street, constantly re-open existing shopping malls in order to increase the usable area, and plan to build exclusively shopping centers in the remaining free areas. The most famous shops on the left side of New Arbat are Adamas, Wild Orchid, Cashmere and Silk, Naf Naf, Delta Sport, TD Novoarbatsky, Moskvichka and Esso. The right side cannot be called as lively. There the sidewalk is not so wide, and there is less space available for retail outlets. But on this side is the famous metropolitan Book House.
Among the stores mentioned above there are no objects with an interesting history, since Novy Arbat is still too young for memoirs. But outlets with an entertaining present - a great many.
In addition to reorientations and reconstructions, Novy Arbat plans to surprise Moscow residents and guests with a series of new interesting projects.