Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt

Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt is the longest thoroughfare in the Petrogradsky district, running from Petrovskaya Embankment to the Bolshaya Nevka river. Unlike the classical ensembles of the city centre, this street took shape as a showcase of early twentieth-century St Petersburg Style Moderne (Art Nouveau) and remains to this day one of the most cohesive collections of buildings in that style in Russia.

A road to Kamenny Island had existed since 1712, and the current name became attached to the avenue at the beginning of the nineteenth century. After the revolution the thoroughfare was renamed Ulitsa Krasnykh Zor ("Red Dawns Street"), and on 15 December 1934, shortly after the assassination of the party leader Sergei Kirov, who had lived on the same street, the avenue became Kirovsky Prospekt; the historic name was restored only on 4 October 1991. The decisive stage of development began in 1903, when the avenue was extended through Alexander Park to the new Troitsky Bridge — it was from that point that the area began to be built up en masse in the fashionable European taste of the day.

The programmatic work of the ensemble is the Ida Lidval apartment building on the corner of Malaya Posadskaya Street — the first independent work of the architect Fyodor Lidval, built to commission from his mother in 1899–1904 in the spirit of Nordic Art Nouveau. Four blocks of varying height are united by a courtyard of honour with a wrought-iron railing on red granite piers, and the architect himself lived here, in an apartment on the third floor. At the junction with what is now Ulitsa Mira, an ensemble of houses by the architect Vasily Shaub took shape, giving rise to Austrian Square, while Lidval also built his own apartment building on plot 61 — the house of the honorary citizen Zimmerman, with some twenty windows of differing shapes and one of the city's first lift systems.

The avenue's residents over the years included a wide range of celebrated figures: the painter Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, the actor Yuri Yuryev, the physical chemist Alexander Terenin, the opera singer Feodor Chaliapin, who lived in a house designed by the architect Konstantin Markov, and General Alexei Kuropatkin. At the start of the avenue, in Alexander Park, stands the 1911 monument to the destroyer Steregushchy — the only Art Nouveau monument in the city and the last one erected before the revolution.

In 2016 the boundaries of the avenue were clarified to include the section of the former Troitskaya Embankment as far as Petrovskaya Embankment. Today the buildings along Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt have almost entirely preserved their early twentieth-century appearance and are protected as a unified urban-planning ensemble.

Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt remains a phenomenon unique to St Petersburg — a long street where the Art Nouveau style defines the character of the buildings along almost its entire length, rather than appearing in isolated fragments amid buildings of other eras, as is the case on most of the city's central thoroughfares.