The incredible story of Tverskaya Street.

]The incredible story of Tverskaya Street.

In front of the Kremlin and the Red Square is the great Tverskaya street. An important street that, since the 12th century, already connected Moscow with the city of Tver, and was the center of social life in the capital.
At present, Tverskaya is a wide street full of huge Stalinist-style buildings, shops and banks.

For the tourist, at first glance it may seem like any main street, one of those that we can find in the center of all modern cities. However, Tverskaya hides a special story …

It all started in 1935 when the Moscow General Reconstruction Plan was implemented to reform the city and have a more socialist aspect.

Iósif Stalin decided that Tverskara Street should be extended, as it must be wide enough to house the imposing Soviet military parades.

So two red lines were drawn on both sides, marking the territory and the distance at which the street should be widened. All interfering buildings had to be destroyed or displaced.

Yes, they have read well, displaced. They were Stalin’s orders. As you can see in the Soviet Union, things were done differently.

For this they began to build a complex system of structures under the buildings, in which they designed twelve long channels to implement beams, and then rails. The building must be moved through the rails with the help of a kind of giant skates that placed under the building and rolled it in the desired direction.

As expected, the tenants were terrified … How could they move the colossal building where they lived and weighed 23,000 tons? “It will collapse and we will all die,” some thought.

So the government deliberately gave an erroneous date to reassure them, the date was so distant that the inhabitants already thought that such displacements were not going to take place, because after all the plan was crazy.

As a result, on March 4, 1939 at 2:40 a.m., while everyone slept, a 20-ton elevator was placed under the building and the plan was carried out: the first building moved 50 meters while its 500 neighbors They slept peacefully.

When people woke up they couldn’t believe it. Building number 6, four stories high, was now located 50 meters further … The movement down the rails had been so smooth and fluid that they did not even wake up. They say that even a 6-year-old girl had built a tower of toy blocks the night before, and the next morning the tower was still intact.

After that event, when people could see that the process was safe, they began to move more and more buildings, in total about thirty blocks changed places and as many were demolished, but the goal of widening Tverskaya Street was finally compliment.

The history

In the 15th century, in front of the Historical Road, a wooden bridge was built that connected the Tver road to Moscow in a straight line, which had previously zigzagged in the area of ​​modern Bryusovsky Lane to the Middle Arsenal Tower, and there was a bridge. In the same century, the road to Tver merged with the road to Veliky Novgorod, and this street became the main street of Moscow.

In 1504, Tverskaya Street had two “bars” – metal doors that closed at night. The living “grid” was not far from Okhotny Ryad; Dorado – in Tverskaya Square. Foreign ambassadors drove along the courtyard of Tverskaya, and the tsars entered Moscow along it. The Moiseevsky Monastery was built on it in the area of ​​Manezhnaya Square, Voskresensky, not far from Tverskaya Square, the Church of Elijah the Prophet, the Transfiguration of Our Savior, Basil of Caesarea and Dmitry Solunsky.

Founded under Ivan IV the Terrible, the monastery of Moses was abolished, according to information from the Moscow expert PVSytin, in 1756 and was finally dismantled in 1789. The oldest tall Voskresensky monastery (Tver male Greek), founded in the century XV, existed until the seventeenth century. Then in their territory were courtyards. One of them, Savvinskoe, has been preserved. The rest was dismantled after the Patriotic War of 1812. The Church of Dmitry Solunsky was dismantled at the Tver Gate …

The modern Tverskaya street begins with the construction of the National Hotel. Later in Tverskaya are the M.N. And a little further: the famous shop “Eliseevsky”. At the end of the 18th century, this building was built by MF Kazakov. In 1898 – 1901, the architect G.F. Baranovsky rebuilt it “beyond recognition.”
The building was bought by the owner of the St. Petersburg commercial company G. G. Eliseev, who opened the largest gastronomic shop here at the time, which the Muscovites called the “Eliseev store”, “Eliseevsky store”. This store was very popular throughout the 20th century: the products here were always good, and Eliseevsky’s interior was amazing.

One can say with confidence about the stores in Tverskaya: they attracted and attracted customers not only because of the availability of products, but also for some reason … perhaps because they were built by large-scale people, such as merchants. After all, these are shops on the main street of Moscow.
Once Tverskaya Square was called Skobelevskaya in honor of M. D. Skobelev, a wonderful Russian general, a hero of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878. The authority of M. D. Skobelev was excessively high among the Russian people. The “White General” (was attacked with a white uniform, on a white horse) erected a magnificent monument in the square.

But in the twentieth century they considered Mikhail Dmitrievich a “royal servant,” although he faithfully served his country and the Russian people. They demolished the monument to Skobelev and his soldiers, erected in the former Skobelevskaya Square an obelisk of the Soviet Constitution with a statue of Liberty, and then Liberty did not like anyone, and was demolished in 1941 And in 1954, a monument was erected in front of the Moscow City Hall to the founder of Moscow, Yuri Dolgoruky. The decision was correct, because if it were not for the founder of the city to erect a monument in the building where the city administration was located?