#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. At the mouth of our Pushkin street, on the site of the current Yenisey store, they first wanted to build a library and a club, and decorate the building’s main portico with a bronze Pushkin. This is apparently where the street’s name came from.
The first building on Pushkin street was school No. 4, which was built in 1950. According to the architectural design, the “forth” is a close relative of the first school, built a year before it, as well as the fifth and sixth, which appeared later. According to the memorial plaque that hung on the building’s facade, the fourth school was built in just 67 days.
The Norilsk newspaper Stalinets wrote in 1950: “Thanks to the coordinated work of the entire team, already on June 1 at 13:00 the excavation work was completed and the builders began concreting”. On June 25, the first brick was laid at the construction site, and on September 1, schoolchildren entered the new school. “Looking around, surprised and delighted students crossed the threshold. “Welcome!” – greeted them the welcoming banner. The first day of classes was unusual for the teaching staff also. Of the 20 teachers at this school, 14 entered the classroom for the first time after graduating from special education. They came from different universities across the country”.
The square, which was also named after Pushkin, began to be built there in the summer of 1952. The tundra bushes quickly took root, because the land was well manured: before that, there were buildings of the Norilsk state farm – cowsheds and pigsties. Community activists worked in the park, beautifying the area on cleanup days.
“The first cleanup Sunday work on laying out a new park took place in an organized manner”, wrote Stalinets. “It was supposed that 1200 people would come out, but there were much more of them, some came out with their families. In three hours, 1940 cubic meters of soil were removed and transported… We are not talking about a small garden, but about a huge square that is emerging in the very center of the young city. The circumference of the park will be almost three kilometers”.
In addition to the square, volleyball and basketball courts, a fountain were planned, and in winter the square areas were intended to be used as an ice skating rink. They wanted to erect a monument in front of the school – of course, to Pushkin. But in reality, Norilsk Pushkin, together with the heroes of his fairy tales, appeared on this street only 60 years later – in 2011.
In 1956, the area next to the square began to be leveled for a new stadium. It was opened on July 18, 1959, Metallurgist Day. Our stadium managed to change three names: during the construction it was called Stroitel (eng.: Builder), it was opened as Younost (eng.: Youth), and when in 1961 the city opened its own sports club Zapolyarnik (eng.: The one behind the Polar circle), the same name appeared on the entrance group of the main sports ground. In the summer, the stadium hosted football matches, races and relay races, parades of athletes, and in general, not a single city celebration was complete without a sports festival at the Zapolyarnik. Norilsk residents walked and rested in the green park, an indispensable barrel of kvass arrived there, and it happened that the stadium even housed a touring circus. In winter, the ice skating rink was made at Zapolyarnik, the rentals were in operation, and ice passions flared up around the open hockey rink. There were volleyball and basketball courts, a tennis court, sectors for throwing and jumping, even a pit for hurdling. But at the same time, the northern stadium had a harsh character: it was not just the weather conditions that did not spoil the athletes. In the first 30 years of its work, they had to run on a gravel path, and change clothes in a small pavilion, or even right outside. This continued until 1989, when the stadium underwent its first major reconstruction and an administrative and amenity complex building was built.
The stadium and the square were the main attractions of Pushkin street, especially in the summer: greenery, barrels of kvass, and once even a touring circus was located in the stadium. The only place that competed with Zapolyarnik was the city market, which was located behind the fire station at the intersection of Pushkin and Kirov streets. One might say, there were no residential buildings on Pushkin street – they were taken over by the “neighbors”. The house of the Zharki canteen was located on Bogdan Hmelnitsky street, two four-story buildings on the sides of the fourth school had the addresses B. Hmelnitsky street, 8, and Kirov street, 7.
Interesting details of Pushkin street were the arched water conduits that connected those two houses. The same arches stretched along the neighboring Kirov street. They were not only objects of architecture, but also objects of improvement. Those above-ground conduits replaced the current sewers. Designers spent a long time looking for ways to lay communications. They tried to bury them in the ground, but in emergency cases, they could not find the pipes in the melted permafrost. So the idea arose to run heating lines along the roofs, and throw arches-overpasses from house to house. These water pipelines were removed from Pushkin street in the mid-1980s, when a modern collector was laid along it.
In the mid-1990s, two four-story buildings on both sides of the fourth school were demolished. In place of the left one there is now a park, and instead of the Kirov, 7, they began to build a monolithic high-rise building, but its construction was frozen. That corner was generally known as unkind among Norilsk residents. A crane fell on an unfinished high-rise building, and then a parachutist who was supposed to land at the stadium crashed there. The bad reputation was smoothed over only by the temple built on the site of the demolished fire station.
In the History Spot’s previous publication, we talked about what the shelves of Norilsk stores looked like.
Follow us on Telegram, VKontakte.
Text: Svetlana Ferapontova, Photo: Nornickel Polar Branch archive
