Protect the defenders

The townspeople demand to stop the construction, which will destroy the monument to the women air defense fighters who saved Leningrad during the siege.

Residents from different parts of the city came to the Petrograd side to protect the monument and adjacent houses. Near the firewall of building 1-A on Kropotkinskaya Street, on the corner with Kronverkskaya, high, almost in the sky, there is a stylized figure of a woman. In the evening, when it gets dark, two side lights turn on, and it looks as if military searchlights are snatching her out of the darkness. The second name of the sculpture is “Guardian Angel of the Leningrad Sky.”

One of the authors of the monument, sculptor Lev Smorgon, also came to the gathering; Olga Starovoitova and deputy Alexander Kobrinsky spoke. “We have already sent several requests,” the deputy said. — We were told that the owners of the site and the developers had all the documents in order. In my opinion, nothing can be built on this site at all - this is a protected area, and there is a real risk that the surrounding houses will be damaged.”

The history of disputes surrounding the development of the territory of the former baths (which have now been converted into the Senator business center) has been going on for many years. Back in 2005, the former chief artist of St. Petersburg, Ivan Uralov, proposed creating a reserve of 19th-century architecture between Kropotkin, Kronverkskaya, Voskova streets and Pushkarsky Lane. There was a project for the reconstruction of the bathhouse building itself. But all these projects disappeared without a trace in the corridors of Valentina Matvienko’s administration, but construction in a protected area, which was started by the owner of the site, the Empire holding, received permission despite obvious violations of the law.

Current officials assure that there are no grounds to demand that the developer stop construction. The head of the KGA, Oleg Rybin, officially stated that the developer has had all the approvals since 2009.

“In fact, there are a lot of violations here: the planning project has not yet been agreed upon, a historical and cultural examination has not been carried out,” says Lyudmila Semykina, a member of the board of the St. Petersburg branch of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments. — In security zones, building regulations do not apply, and the developer believes that since the urban planning plan for the land plot was approved for him in 2009, it means he can build. Now, on our initiative, the prosecutor is conducting an inspection.

While the public gathering continued, its participants collected almost a hundred signatures. An initiative group has already been created on social networks, which anyone can join.