St. Petersburg's Gasholders: Brick Towers of Gas Light

Drive along the Obvodny Canal embankment and they appear out of nowhere. Enormous brick cylinders that don't reach upward like bell towers — they're squat, wide, thick-walled, with arched openings. They look like fortress towers. Or water towers. Or something that just doesn't fit any familiar category. What are they? Leftover pieces of some wartime fortification? No. These are gasholders — tanks that once stored "illuminating gas," the fuel that lit the street lamps of Nevsky Prospect more than a hundred and fifty years ago.

The story starts long before the towers themselves. In eighteen thirty-nine, Russia's first gasworks fired up on the bank of the Obvodny Canal. Coal was burned in sealed furnaces to produce illuminating gas, which then travelled through underground pipes straight to the lamps. In its first year, a hundred and sixty-seven lamps lit up along Nevsky Prospect and Palace Square.

Before that, nighttime St. Petersburg relied on oil-fed dishes — a flickering yellow flame the wind could snuff out at any moment. Gas burned differently: steady, bright, reliable. A resident of that era, seeing Nevsky Prospect lit by gas for the first time, was looking at a different city altogether. Not a dim maze you had to navigate with your own lantern, but a properly lit street where you could read a shop sign or recognize a face across the road.

By the eighteen-fifties, a rival had sprung up next to the original plant — the "Metropolitan Lighting Company." It, too, set up along the Obvodny Canal, and it's the one that built the brick cylinders still standing today.

The gasholders were designed by Rudolf Bogdanovich Bernhard, an architect and engineer who became the first director of St. Petersburg's Institute of Civil Engineers. The first two cylinders went up in eighteen sixty-one and sixty-two; two more followed in eighteen eighty-four, this time with his son Wilhelm. The largest of them measures forty-two meters across and twenty meters tall. Its roof uses the Schwedler system: metal trusses radiate out from the center like spokes on a giant wheel. It was cutting-edge engineering at the time, and this gasholder was among the first in the world to use that kind of dome.

Inside, a piston — a movable disc — rose and fell with the gas level, keeping pressure constant so the street lamps burned evenly. When gas supply was high, the piston pushed upward, and from outside the tower seemed to grow taller. The gasholder, in effect, breathed.

Gasholders once dotted the whole city. The Sankt-Galli works built a hexagonal one — a rare shape. On Zaozernaya Street, another cylinder from a rival company still stands, nearly untouched. Underground, pipes ran everywhere beneath the streets, unseen but omnipresent.

In eighteen eighty-six, a power station opened next to the plant. For a while, gas and electricity coexisted — gas lamps on one block, arc lamps on the next. But the outcome was already decided. By nineteen-ten, the gasholders stood empty and the plant shut down.

Then came decades of warehouses, garages, and neglect.

Now, a second life. Inside one of the round cylinders on the Obvodny Canal, a planetarium has opened — the dome that once capped thousands of cubic meters of gas now holds a starry sky instead. Nearby: clubs, exhibitions, cinemas. In twenty twenty-five, one of the gasholders was granted regional heritage status. In twenty twenty-six, restoration was announced for another. The brick cylinders that once stored the city's light for more than half a century now hold something else — the sense that St. Petersburg has no truly abandoned past. Only places whose turn hasn't come yet.

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