Lopukhinsky Garden

Along the odd-numbered side of Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, stretching from Academician Pavlov Street to the bank of the Malaya Nevka, lies the 5.7-hectare Lopukhinsky Garden — a regionally significant monument of landscape gardening art. Over three centuries this territory has been a battlefield, an imperial kitchen garden, a private estate, and the subject of court battles over development.

During the Northern War, skirmishes with the Swedes took place here. In 1717 the plot was granted as a dacha to the Siberian governor Prince Matvei Gagarin, who was executed four years later for bribery, after which the land served for almost a century as the tsar's Apothecary Garden. When neighbouring Kamenny Island became the court's summer residence under Paul I, the area came into fashion among the nobility: in the early nineteenth century the owner became Prince Pyotr Lopukhin, father of the emperor's favourite, and later his son, a hero of the war of 1812 and one of the founders of the future Decembrist secret society, who was pardoned by Nicholas I.

The estate's heyday is linked to the name of the merchant and patron Vasily Gromov, who bought the plot in 1848. The architect Gottfried Winterhalter built him a wooden dacha, and Alexei Gornostaev built several greenhouses; the garden was redesigned with grottoes, fountains, gazebos, and little bridges over the ponds. The owner assembled his own picture collection in the house, invited singers from the imperial opera stage, and housed poorly-off students of the newly opened Conservatory here, while from 1849 an entertainment music pavilion run by the Parisian bandmaster Levino operated nearby. Contemporaries recalled in diaries and memoirs the lavish fountains, the steamboat pier, and winter festivities held beneath palm trees in the huge greenhouse.

In 1926 the garden was renamed in honour of Felix Dzerzhinsky, and its historic name was restored only in 1991. In the 1930s the former Gromov dacha housed a rest home for Stakhanovite drivers, and from 1938 to 1961 the adjoining stone building was home to the Leningrad television studio — from where the city's first experimental television broadcast was made. A reconstruction in 1936 replaced the network of paths with straight avenues, and repairs in 1950 destroyed the historic grottoes.

In the early 1990s the garden's landscape layout was restored, but in the 2000s it came under threat of development: the authorities leased and then sold to a developer the site of a former motorboat station for a hotel, despite a court ban on privatising this land. After years of litigation and appeals from the public, in 2013 the Committee for the State Inspection and Protection of Historic and Cultural Monuments (KGIOP) officially returned the disputed plot within the boundaries of the protected monument, depriving the developer of grounds for construction. In 2014–2015 a major overhaul of the garden was carried out, and from 2016 to 2020 the Gromov dacha itself — one of the city's oldest wooden buildings — was also restored; beneath layers of Soviet-era repairs, genuine wall paintings and marble sculptures forgotten in the basement were discovered.

Today Lopukhinsky Garden is a well-kept green zone of the district, and the restored Gromov dacha, with the griffin figures on its porch recreated, has been given over to a youth centre, continuing to serve local residents almost two centuries after it was built.