Wednesday Walk. Courtyards and Quiet Streets

Radishchev Street

Greetings, dear friends, Wednesday walk lovers! I hope that you - like me - love walks on other days of the week too, but a Wednesday walk is something special, because it is not only a walk but also a #WednesdayWalk challenge by @tattoodjay.

Ligovsky Prospect near the "Oktyabrsky" concert hall, the courtyard

Flower store in the courtyard

Today I want to tell you about my walk a few days ago, on a sunny summer day. Although August is not over according to the calendar, the weather in our city has drastically deteriorated, cooling from +30°C to +10°C in three days. That's what the weather report on the website says: at 16:30 it's now +10°C outside and the rain won't stop raining in the next two hours. I'm not morally ready to go for a walk in such weather yet, although, of course, in two or three months my attitude to +10°C will change diametrically.

A typical apartment license plate. You can see that the old large apartments were divided into several, and new apartment numbers were added to the old sequence

You may now kiss each other

On this day, the weather was still really summery, sunny and warm. I was walking through one of the central districts of the city. It was not a very wealthy district, located far enough away from the imperial residence and the palaces of the great princes. The main building of the neighborhood consisted of tenement houses of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Nowadays many of these 19th century apartment buildings are considered to be architectural monuments.

Before the building boom of the 19th century the area was built up with small houses, sometimes of stone but more often of wood. I started my walk at the Oktyabrskaya Hotel, where the Elephant Yard had been located in the 18th century. At that time the area looked something like this:

An illustration to Ivan Krylov's fable "Elephant and Moose"

Elephants were brought to St. Petersburg by the Persian Embassy, as a gift to the Imperial family from the shah of Iran (Persia) Nader Shah Afshar. For elephants there were special elephant pens, a place for watering, and a swimming pool for bathing. The elephants were taken out for walks in the city streets, and people watched with interest these exotic animals for the northern country.

Nowadays, you are unlikely to see animals bigger than cats and dogs on these streets. Now it is a quiet and peaceful neighborhood, which is very pleasant to walk around, looking at the architectural decor of buildings, unusual balconies, old plates with apartment numbers, tiles underfoot at the entrance to the front door, and other details of urban life.

I strolled along the streets, peering into the courtyards, and gradually reached the Tavrichesky Garden. It was very timely - after a walk it was nice to sit on a comfortable wooden bench on the bank of the pond.