Category talk:Shkolnaya Street

Object location	55° 44′ 43″ N, 37° 40′ 23″ E	View all coordinates using: OpenStreetMap

Pedestrian part of Shkolnaya Street

Rows of inns along First Rogozhskaya (now Shkolnaya) Street on a 1853 map

Shkolnaya Street in Tagansky District of Moscow, Russia connects Dobrovolcheskaya Street in the west with Rogozhskaya Zastava Street in the east. The street, a protected heritage area lined with two-storey 19th century buildings, is closed to through traffic and is a de facto pedestrian zone and a weekend market place. Historically it was known as First Rogozhskaya street, being the main trading street of the former Rogozhskaya sloboda, and acquired its current name, one of the most common in Soviet toponymy, in 1923.

History

Rogozhskaya sloboda of yam coachmen serving the mail route to Vladimir and Ryazan was established as an eastern suburb of Moscow in the end of the 16th century. The name of the sloboda and its streets goes back to Rogozhi (now Noginsk), the first overnight station on the Vladimirka road. In the second half of the 18th century the sloboda experienced an influx of Old Believers, a persecuted religious minority that was allowed to practice their faith in an out-of-town Rogozhskoye Cemetery; the entrepreneurial and secretive Old Believers formed a unique business community and contributed to industrialization of Eastern Moscow in the 19th century.

By 1848 First Rogozhskaya Street, one block south from the main Vladimirka road, was firmly established as the principal trading street of the sloboda, as evidenced by black façade lines on contemporary maps, indicating a continuous brick store front within a largely wooden neighborhood. Most of the building also housed inns for the coachmen, with coaches and flammable goods stored inside spacious back yards; the street was regularly razed by accidental fires.

The 1861 opening of a railroad terminal connecting Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod spelled the end of the coachmen's business but boosted the Old Believers' community. Railroad owners placed the terminal east of Rogozhsky Val Street (then the eastern city limit of Moscow) to save on cost of land. In 1896 passenger terminal was relocated downtown to present-day Kursky Railroad Terminal; freight yards on the site of old terminal operated until the 1950s. According to opera tenor Pavel Bogatyryov, a native of Rogozhskaya Sloboda whose father owned a slaughterhouse and an inn with an underground blood sport pit, the coachmen and associated innkeeping business agonized until a disastrous three-day fire in 1886. The sloboda was rebuilt by different owners.

In 1910 the city built an electrical substation for the sprawling tramway system on the corner of First Rogozhskaya and Bolshaya Andronyevskaya, the building stands to date. Trams serving the street ran through the parallel Voronya (later Tulinskaya) Street, the old Vladimirka; in 1952, when service through Tulinskaya was shut down to make way for car traffic, tram tracks were relocated to Shkolnaya Street. Service through Shkolnaya was shut down in 1980; lines on Rogozhsky Val and Bolshaya Andronyevskaya operate to date (November 2009).

The street was renamed Shkolnaya (literally School Street) in 1923; in the same year nearby Second Rogozhskaya became Bibliotechnaya (Library Street). The 2007 Streets of Moscow reference does not cite any particular reason for the rename apart from abstract "cultural change". Curiously, when Moscow city limits were expanded in 1960 and the city incorporated dozens of former independent towns and villages, the number of Shkolnaya Streets in the city exploded from one to eighteen (not including nine Shkolny Lanes); in the folowing two decades the number shrank back to one as the former villages were razed for new highrise housing.

In the 1970s and 1980s most of Rogozhskaya Sloboda itself was demolished and replaced with concrete highrise. The westernmost blocks of Shkolnaya Street, too, disappeared to make way for a regional Sberbank office. The rest of Shkolnaya Street, however, was earmarked to become a refurbished pedestrian "historical zone", not unlike Arbat Street on a smaller scale. Reconstruction began in 1985 and continued until 1989. Two-storey buildings on both sides of the street received a facelift, with groundfloor windows and gates imitating 19th century shopping outlets; a look at the back of these houses reveals facadist rebuilding in concrete and modern masonry.

The street, however, did not become a shopping attraction; the plan to open an ethnographic museum failed; the buildings on Shkolnaya are used for offices and on weekdays the "pedestrian" street is taken over by parked cars. On weekends the eastern half of Shkolnaya Street becomes a marketplace. In 2007 the city issued a permit for Moscow’s first legitimate downtown flea market to be held there.

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Sources

• Mikhail Ivanov (1999) (in russian) Moskovsky Tramvay: Stranitsy Istorii (Московский Трамвай: Страницы Истории), GK Mosgortrans
• Lev Kolodny (2007) (in russian) Taganka, Golos Press ISBN 9785711701767