Palace Bridge

The Palace Bridge across the Bolshaya Neva links Admiralteysky Island with Vasilyevsky Island and is listed among the cultural heritage sites of regional significance. The raised wings of its central span set against the backdrop of the Peter and Paul Cathedral and the Kunstkamera form one of the most recognizable views of the city on the Neva. The crossing has five spans, with a width between the railings exceeding twenty-seven meters and a total length of around two hundred fifty meters.

The modern name became attached to the crossing by the middle of the nineteenth century thanks to its proximity to the Winter Palace and Palace Embankment. After the revolution, from the autumn of 1918, the structure was officially called the Republican Bridge, and only in January 1944 was the bridge's pre-revolutionary name restored to the city.

Long before the permanent structure was built, a temporary crossing on pontoons stood here: in the mid-1850s a floating bridge was moved here from St. Isaac's Square in order to connect the imperial residence with the Exchange and the port warehouses. Later a horse-tram car ran along its decking, and it was here that one of the capital's first trials of electric arc lighting took place.

The decision to replace the floating crossing with a permanent one came at the request of homeowners and civic societies. The architectural competition that followed produced no result for a long time — the entries submitted failed to satisfy the jury of leading bridge-building engineers and a representative of the Academy of Arts. After the requirements were revised, the design by the engineer of Polish origin Pshenitsky, submitted on behalf of the Kolomna Works partnership, was accepted. The architect Meltzer took charge of the facade decoration, though his idea of massive lantern towers on the piers was rejected as out of proportion with the neighboring buildings.

The construction contract was signed in 1911, but the outbreak of war and difficulties with metal supplies delayed completion. The bridge, not yet fully finished, was opened to traffic at the end of 1916 — the ceremony was modest. In the Soviet decades the present cast-iron railings appeared, designed by the sculptors Krestovsky and Demyanov, while the plan to decorate the piers with revolutionary sculptural groups was never realized.

The wings of the drawspan are raised by an electric motor; their weight is balanced by counterweights that descend, when the bridge opens, into wells within the piers below the level of the Neva's water. The bridge underwent major repairs in 1967, again in the second half of the 1970s, and once more in the early 2010s.