Passage Trading House

The Passage Trading House on Nevsky Prospekt is one of St Petersburg's oldest and largest department stores. Unlike traditional gostiny dvor arcades with galleries open to the street, the building is a covered through-passage cutting across an entire block — a type previously tried out in the Golitsyn Gallery in Moscow.

Until the mid-19th century this plot was occupied by the house of the architect Mikhail Zemtsov, and the present building was erected in 1846–1848 to a design by Rudolf Zhelyazevich for Count Yakov Essen-Stenbock-Fermor; the grand opening took place on 9 May 1848. From the outset the Passage was conceived as a new kind of commercial space for the city: more than a hundred shops, an auditorium, a restaurant, and even a wax museum. For its time the building boasted advanced engineering — hot-water heating, electric lighting and ventilation — and a fruit market was set up in the basement.

The interior consisted of three-tiered galleries on either side of a through passage roofed with a glass skylight. The façade on Nevsky Prospekt was faced with Radom sandstone and set on a granite plinth, while the more modest façade on Italyanskaya Street was stuccoed. In 1899–1901, on the orders of the new owner, Princess Baryatinskaya, the architect Sergei Kozlov rebuilt the building: it was raised to four storeys, a two-columned portico appeared in front of the main entrance, and the number of trading halls rose to sixty-four, with a total area of more than five thousand square metres — the building turned into a purely commercial one.

From 1879 part of the premises was occupied by the French bank Crédit Lyonnais — the only foreign bank then permitted to operate in Russia. From the 1860s the concert hall on the Italyanskaya Street side hosted public lectures and literary evenings attended by Turgenev, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky and Shevchenko, and in 1904–1906 Vera Komissarzhevskaya's New Drama Theatre operated there.

After the revolution the department store was repeatedly closed for reconstruction: in 1933 it became a state enterprise, and a year later the architect Noi Trotsky partially redesigned the galleries and staircases. During the war the building was mothballed, then reopened to shoppers in February 1947; in 1961 the first specialised women's department store in the USSR opened here.

In 1992 the Passage was turned into a joint-stock company, and in 2006 the trading house was bought at auction for 50 million dollars; in 2011 it was acquired by an investment fund from structures affiliated with VTB Bank for around 80 million. Despite disputes surrounding recent restoration work, the Passage remains one of the symbols of commercial Nevsky Prospekt and continues to operate as a department store.