The Island That Kept Starting Over

Hello. In the very heart of Saint Petersburg, there's an island that shouldn't exist. People made it. They simply dug two canals, the Kryukov and the Admiralty, between the Neva river and the little Moika, and a piece of land was left standing on its own. That was in seventeen nineteen, and from the start this island wasn't meant for strolling. It was meant for work.

The work was to store ship timber. Petersburg was building a navy, a navy needs logs, and logs are a fussy material. Stack them in a pile and leave them for years, and the bottom ones go damp and rot. Instead of a mast, you get dust. And here comes the idea that makes this place worth remembering.

The timber was stored standing up. Vertical, ends down, like pencils in a glass, except that each pencil was several times taller than a person. The method was borrowed from the Dutch, and that's where the name comes from: New Holland. The gain was double. The wood gets air and doesn't rot, and far more of it fits on the same patch of ground. The warehouses were built tall for exactly this reason. When you look at those brick buildings today, remember that their proportions were dictated not by beauty but by drying logs. They were designed by Savva Chevakinsky and by a Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe. The famous arch over the canal, twenty-three metres high, appeared at the end of the eighteenth century.

The island's first life was a warehouse. The second began in the eighteen-twenties, and it's darker. The architect Alexander Staubert built a round naval prison here. Because of its shape, people nicknamed it "the Bottle." There's a suspicion that this is where the Russian saying "don't climb into the bottle" comes from, meaning don't pick a fight, though linguists argue about it. So on one small island, logs and prisoners ended up side by side.

There was also a third life, which fewer people know about. At the end of the nineteenth century, a test basin was built here: a long covered pool where models of ships were tried out. In the early twentieth century, Aleksey Krylov ran experiments in it, one of Russia's leading shipbuilders. So the island that once dried timber for sailing ships lived to see the calculations behind steel ones.

And then the island was simply closed. In Soviet times it was a military base: navy stores, a fence, passes at the gate. For city residents, New Holland became a blank spot on the map. Here's the arch, here are the brick walls, here's the water, and that's it, no further. The buildings decayed, the roofs leaked, trees grew where trees had no business growing. It went on like that for decades.

Only in two thousand eleven, on the sixteenth of July, was the island opened to people for the first time in three centuries. Not as a museum, not as a factory. First, just as grass. A lawn, benches, a café, wooden walkways. At first people didn't know what to do here. The habit of "you can't go in" turned out to be stronger than the fence. Then they got used to it, and now it's one of those places you go to for no reason at all, to lie down, listen to music, sit with a child.

Restoration is still under way, slow and expensive. Plans have slipped more than once, and some buildings are still waiting their turn. But the main thing has already happened. A place that was closed for three hundred years, first because it was a warehouse, then a prison, then a military zone, has become shared.

People often talk about the second life of things: a bottle, a rag, a plank. But buildings can have three or four lives, and the only difference is the scale of time. Warehouse, prison, laboratory, fenced-off base, park, and all of it the same brick, the same walls, the same island, starting over every time.

And do you know what the most hopeful part of this story is? That abandoned isn't a verdict. That brick walls that stood for half a century behind a fence can end up as the most pleasant place in the city. All it takes is for someone to decide they're worth repairing, not tearing down.

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