The House Built on a Prison

Hello. Say you're in Kolomna, an old quarter of Saint Petersburg, right now. Find the corner where the Moyka river meets the Kryukov canal. You'll see an ordinary apartment block: seven floors, balconies, windows, kitchens. A house like any other. But it stands on the foundations of a prison. It may be the most honest example of a second life you'll find anywhere in the city.

At first there was no prison here at all. In seventeen eighty-two, the architect Ivan Starov, the same man who built the Tauride Palace, began putting up a big building with seven towers. It took five years. People called it a castle because of the towers. They called it Lithuanian because, early in the next century, the Lithuanian Musketeer Regiment was quartered here. The name stuck to the walls. It outlived the regiment, and it outlived the building itself.

Then, in eighteen twenty-three, the building's fate changed. It was rebuilt as the city prison, by the architects Iosif Charlemagne and Pyotr Plavov. A hundred and three cells, meant for six hundred prisoners. In practice it often held eight hundred, sometimes a thousand. Prisons always do, everywhere.

For almost a hundred years, this is what the fortress was. It stood in the middle of a residential district, among apartments, shops and horse cabs. People in Kolomna walked past it on their way to the bakery. That matters. The prison wasn't out on some far edge of town. It was right here, two steps from a kitchen where someone was cooking dinner.

On the twenty-seventh of February, nineteen seventeen, at about six in the morning, it all ended. Sailors and workers stormed the prison, let the prisoners out and set the building on fire. It burned for a long time, and burned to the ground. A month later Alexander Blok, the poet, who lived right here in Kolomna, wrote his mother a short line that says more than any description. The Lithuanian Castle and the district court, he wrote, had burned to the ground. Then came the most unexpected observation. In the fire, he said, the beauty of their facades suddenly showed. And all the vileness that had disfigured them from inside had burned away.

What came next is the part people tend to forget. The ruins didn't go anywhere. They just stood there, and not for a year or two, but for more than ten. Charred walls and empty windows in the middle of a lived-in neighborhood. Children played in the wreckage, and neighbors carted off whatever wasn't nailed down. It was a huge hole in the middle of the city, and the city slowly learned to live beside it.

The ruins were cleared only in nineteen twenty-nine and nineteen thirty. And here comes the turn, the reason I'm telling you all this. They weren't cleared completely. The foundation was too good to throw away: massive, solid, laid in Starov's day to last. And on that foundation, in nineteen thirty, the architects Isidor Meerson and Yakov Rubanchik built an apartment house for workers. It's the house you can see today, number twenty-nine on Decembrists Street.

Think about what happened. The prison wasn't erased. It was put to use. Its base, the part that goes down into the ground, the part nobody ever sees, is still working. It holds up walls where people live, argue, raise children and hang laundry on the balconies. A building that was a symbol of captivity for a hundred years has become, quite literally, the ground under people's homes. And none of the residents, stepping out in the morning for bread, give it a thought.

People like to picture a second life for things as something stylish: an old factory turned gallery, a bottle turned vase, jeans turned into a bag. But more often it looks like this, quiet and piece by piece. What survived wasn't the building, but its foundation. Not the image, but the work. And, honestly, that's the sturdiest kind of second life. What holds things up outlasts what you can see.

So if you ever pass the corner of the Moyka and the Kryukov canal, stop for a minute. Above ground there's an ordinary house from the nineteen thirties. Below ground is the eighteenth century, Starov and his seven towers. A city never throws anything away entirely.

Anything at all — a building, a word, a habit you never questioned. moygid dot online.