Walk to the old water pumping station

tatdt (65)in Photography • 3 years ago

On this day I had to go on business to a district of the city near the Bypass (Obvodny) Canal, a place where quite a few factories and plants had been built in the 19th century, but few ordinary residential buildings. The Bypass Canal served both as a transport artery and as a source of water for businesses. Not for drinking, only for production - the water in this canal was never particularly clean:)

I got off early and decided to devote my free time to a walk around the neighborhood. To begin with, I went out to the American Bridges. These are the railroad bridges over the Bypass Canal on the St. Petersburg-Moscow railroad line. The traffic on this direction is very busy, so several parallel bridges were spanning the water barrier. The name "American" came about because of the design of these bridges, it was developed by an engineer educated in America, and the appearance of the bridges was reminiscent of this country.

The embankments of the Obvodny Canal look attractive, the old red-brick industrial buildings and other old buildings have become seemingly beautiful already because of their age, if not because of the talent of the architects. But there is a lot of car traffic on the embankment, so it's not very pleasant to walk along the Obvodny Canal.

As I got closer to the Neva River, monuments of architecture and history began to appear in the rows of ordinary buildings. This plaque tells us that in the 19th century this building housed the barracks of the Life Guards Cossack Regiment. It was a regiment of the Guards cavalry, and was manned by Don Cossacks. The Cossacks of the regiment carried out part of the activities of guarding the emperor in the convoy during his movements, including when he was traveling with his family.

In the window of the next building I saw a decorated Christmas tree. Very unexpected for a hot summer day! It looks like this building is staffed by worthy members of the Lazy People's Association.

The main purpose of my walk was to see the old water pumping station near the mouth of the Monastyrka River. This water pumping station was built in 1906-1907 for the central electric station of the city streetcar.

When designing the city streetcar in the 1900s, two possible options were discussed - the construction of several small power plants in different areas of the city or the creation of a single power plant, the option of a central power plant was adopted. The construction of a power plant requires a pumping station for service water from a running water reservoir nearby, or the creation of cooling towers, cooling pools, when creating a power plant should be built and a pumping station. The building of the water pumping station was designed by architect Zazersky Alexey Ivanovich, engineer Gorenberg Leonid Borisovich.

From the waterworks building I walked along the bank of the Monastyrka River to the pedestrian bridge to the Metropolitan Garden.

The Metropolitan Garden was laid out at the beginning of the 18th century. It had cherry trees, apple trees and linden trees. A small redevelopment was made in the XIX century. It is believed that the appearance of the garden has not changed much since then. I love vintage, but I think some changes would have benefited this garden. For example, benches for relaxing would be very appropriate. The Metropolitan Garden belongs to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, it is a male Orthodox monastery founded in 1710.