Addresses of St. Petersburg
Explore St. Petersburg street by street. When Peter the Great founded his new city, he wanted it to consist of a series of narrow canals rather than streets, with citizens moving everywhere by boat. Settlers in the city quickly tired of this fantasy, however, and St. Petersburg's urban landscape developed as a modern city of broad, straight avenues, leafy boulevards and majestic squares.
Geography could not be overcome entirely, however, and St. Petersburg's many twisting waterways break up the rigid grid of the city's streets, giving an organic and picturesque aspect to even the most formal public spaces. What is more, even the grandest avenues cannot match the broad still waters of Neva River, and its seemingly endless granite embankments provide an extraordinarily beautiful setting for some of the city's most stunning buildings.
St. Petersburg's most famous address, Nevsky Prospekt, is only one of dozens of broad, straight thoroughfares that cut through the city and act as the main arteries for traffic and for pedestrians. Most of these "prospekts" were carefully planned, and show St. Petersburg at its most formally magnificent.
Troitskaya Ploshchad (Trinity Square) next to the Peter and Paul Fortress was the original centre of St. Petersburg in the city's earliest years, but it was over a century later that the prolific architect Carlo Rossi almost single-handedly created the majority of the city's most famous public places in high Empire style.
St. Petersburg's many waterways are nearly all enclosed in grand granite embankments. These homogeneous gray structures provide a recurring, unifying motif against which to view a huge variety of architecture and sculpture.
Less grand than St. Petersburg's magnificent avenues, the city's side streets are nonetheless rich in historic and architectural treasures, and some of the most interesting and attractive streets have been pedestrianized, making them particularly attractive for visitors to explore.
