Nikolsky Market (Nikolsky Trading Rows)

Nikolsky Market at 62 Sadovaya Street grew up on a plot that in the 1730s had been earmarked for a naval regimental yard with barracks, though the plan was never carried out. The design for a trading building, whose author remains unidentified, was submitted to the city duma in the autumn of 1787 and received the approval of Catherine II. Construction in the northern part of the block was completed in 1789 — the site proved convenient thanks to its proximity to two waterways suitable for delivering goods. The market was at first called the Ochakov Market, since construction was finished on the very day Suvorov's troops captured the Turkish fortress of Ochakov. The building was funded not by the treasury but by merchant money, so the market was privately owned from the outset. Its layout followed commercial logic: identical shops with separate entrances occupied the ground floor, while offices and storerooms took up the second, and all the premises were linked by an open arcaded gallery that also ran around the perimeter of the inner courtyard.

A fire in 1825 damaged the building, but restoration took little time. In the 1880s the so-called Obzhorny Ryad ("Gluttons' Row") was relocated here from Sennaya Square — a line of cheap eateries under an awning along the canal, where masons, carpenters and other seasonal labourers took their meals. After the Revolution the trading rows were occupied by an enamelware factory, and in the postwar decades the "Metalloposuda" artel operated here.

By the mid-2000s the building had fallen into disrepair. In 2007 the city authorities ordered preparations for restoration to begin, but a 2008 survey found more than 70 percent of the structures to be unsafe, and the investor proposed preserving only the façades and gallery while building a hotel with an underground car park inside. Heritage preservation specialists disagreed with this plan. In 2010 the complex passed to a new owner and was placed on the federal list of protected sites; nevertheless, the redevelopment project initially still envisaged building over the courtyard and constructing an underground car park.

Large-scale reconstruction began in 2013 to a design by the "Liteynaya Chast-91" bureau: several sections of the original building were preserved, along with some of the ground-floor finishing and fragments of stucco decoration, while the rest of the interiors were irretrievably lost. The work lasted nearly eight years and cost around 3 billion roubles, being completed in 2018: the building retained its historical appearance on the outside, while inside it now houses the Holiday Inn Express and Meininger hotels, as well as the city's first Hard Rock Cafe restaurant. In the summer of 2020 the spacious inner courtyard was opened for free public access to residents and visitors alike.