Green Bridge

The Green Bridge spans the Moika River along the axis of Nevsky Prospect, connecting Kazansky Island and the 2nd Admiralteysky Island in the centre of St Petersburg. It is one of the city's "coloured" bridges and a monument of engineering art of federal significance: it was here that a cast-iron arch structure was used for the first time in the city for a road bridge, a solution later repeated on several other crossings of the Moika.

The first wooden crossing appeared on this site in the early 1720s, when the city boundary ran along here and a toll was collected from those passing through. In 1777, as the banks of the Moika were being faced with granite, the drawbridge was replaced by a three-span bridge on stone piers. Radical changes began in 1805: the engineer William Hastie proposed a new scheme — a vault made of hollow cast-iron sections bolted together. The project was approved by Alexander I, and already in 1806 the crossing was built in just seven months — thus the city acquired its first cast-iron road structure.

The vault was assembled from 126 hollow, elliptically shaped cast-iron sections laid in fourteen rows; the pavements were paved with granite slabs, and the railings were cast to the pattern of the embankment's own ironwork. This scheme formed the basis of the "model" cast-iron bridge design of 1807, later used in the construction of several other city crossings. In 1842 the roadway was widened by cantilevering the pavements out to the sides, and two years later Russia's first asphalt-block paving was laid here. In 1906–1908, as tram tracks were being laid along Nevsky Prospect, the vault was widened with new rows of sections, and the façades were decorated with applied ornament and gilded candelabra.

The bridge received the name "Green" in the 1730s, after the colour it was painted, and a decree of the building commission dated 20 April 1738 fixed this name officially, along with the names of the neighbouring "coloured" crossings over the Moika. From the late 18th century another name also took hold in common usage — Politseysky (Police) Bridge, after the city police administration located nearby. In September 1859, crowds gathered here to welcome the Danish princess Dagmar, betrothed to the heir to the throne — the railings failed to withstand the pressure of the crowd, and several people fell into the river. In January 1905 the events of Bloody Sunday unfolded near this crossing. In 1918 the bridge was renamed Narodny (People's) Bridge, and in January 1998 its former name was restored.

By the beginning of the 21st century, the load-bearing structure had exhausted its service life: a 2011 survey revealed cracks in the vault sections and corrosion damage to the piers. In 2019–2020 a large-scale restoration took place: the vault was levelled and repaired, a relieving reinforced-concrete arch was built over it, and the pier foundations were reinforced with piles. The work was completed in the summer of 2020. Its eight-lane roadway carries a busy stretch of Nevsky Prospect, and the Stroganov Palace still stands nearby.

The Green Bridge remains far more than a purely utilitarian crossing — it is a monument to early-19th-century engineering thought. Its design became the starting point for a whole series of similar cast-iron bridges across the city, and its preserved appearance makes it part of the very silhouette of the Neva capital.