Distant rural past
The territory in modern Moscow bounded by the Entuziastov highway, Zolotorozhsky Val street and the Hammer and Sickle Factory passage, in the 16th century was part of the possession of the monastery village of Karacharova, which belonged to the Andronikov Monastery of the Savior. For almost three centuries, this site served as arable and pasture lands - at least, there are no mentions of any settlements here in the annals.
In 1649, near the village of Karacharova and the Andronikov Monastery, vast tracts of land were demarcated for the city pasture, among which there was a part of the territory of interest to us. At the end of the 17th century, the construction of the residences of the nobility and kings began here, and in the 1730s, during the construction of the palace and park complex, known as the Summer Annenhof, the Annenhof Grove was planted to the east of it. If the grove had survived to this day, then its southern end would have become part of a new multifunctional district at the site of the plant, but its fate would have turned out differently: on June 16 (29), 1904, all the trees were literally “shaved off” by a tornado, which also destroyed Karacharovo in Moscow. Andronovo, Lefortovo barracks and part of Sokolniki, and reached Yaroslavl.
Under the auspices of the state
In 1738-1742 Moscow was surrounded by the line of the Kamer-Kollezhsky Val, which became the customs border of the city. Outposts appeared on all main roads: on Vladimirskaya - Rogozhskaya, on Ryazanskaya - Pokrovskaya, and in the second half of the 18th century, Prolomnaya Zastava was set up in the Lefortovo area. In 1764, in the course of the secularization of the church lands, Andronovka and Karacharovo were transferred to the jurisdiction of the College of Economics. From that moment on, a new page in the history of these lands begins: they parted with the status of farmland. Already at the beginning of the 19th century, the first factory establishments appeared in the territories adjacent to the outposts. So, for example, on the Topographic map of the circumference of Moscow in 1818, from the outside of the Rogozhsky Val, the Tar plant is shown, to the south of the village of Novaya Andronovka - the Kanitelny plant.
In the early 1840s. The Vladimirskaya road was reconstructed, straightened and named Vladimirskoe highway. In 1840, in the village of Novaya Andronovka (from the north of the new route), the All Saints Church and a high bell tower were erected (architect P. P. Burenin). In 1862 the territory was transformed into the All-Saints Monastery of the same faith. In 1873, a two-story building of the St. Nicholas Church with the Intercession Chapel (Shosse Entuziastov, 7) was erected along the line of the Vladimir highway, which has been disfigured to this day on the territory immediately adjacent to the Serp and Molot plant.
On the web of railways
Perhaps the greatest influence on the study area was exerted by the railway construction that unfolded since the early 1860s. The first section of the Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod railway was built in 1862: its passenger station is located behind Pokrovskaya Zastava to the north of the Ryazan road - now it is the Hammer and Sickle platform. This initial section of the road ran parallel to the Ryazan highway along the northern outskirts of the village of Khokhlovka, and already in 1864, movement began on the Moscow-Ryazan (Kazan) railway. In 1867, they were joined by the Kursk railway line, the route of which crossed the Kamer-Kollezhsky Val and Vladimirskaya road along the bed of the filled-up Golden Horn stream, and a little later it was connected to the Nizhny Novgorod road by a special branch.
It was such a rapid construction in the area of railways and access roads that stimulated the development of large-scale industry here. In 1870, at the intersection of the Kazan railway line and the Vladimirskoe highway, a boiler-mechanical and copper-hardware plant "Dangauer and Kaiser" was founded, which was engaged in the production of equipment for the food industry. And in 1883, between the Rogozhsky Val and the connecting branch on the land of New Andronovka, the French entrepreneur Julius Guzhon founded the Partnership of the Moscow Metal Plant. Construction continued for seven years, and in 1890 the first open-hearth furnace using fuel oil was put into operation. In 1913, seven open-hearth furnaces were already operating here, melting more than 90,000 tons of steel per year, several small-section and sheet-rolling mills. The plant, which employed more than 2,000 workers, quickly became the largest metalworking enterprise in Moscow. Simple iron was produced on it, as well as wire, nails, bolts, etc., indispensable in city and private households.
Era "Hammer and Sickle"
In Soviet times, all large enterprises in the described area were nationalized. The Gujon plant was no exception: in 1922 it was renamed the Moscow Metallurgical Plant Hammer and Sickle (the Dangauer and Kaiser plant became the Kotloapparat plant, and the Vladimirskoye Shosse was renamed Entuziastov Shosse). The expansion of the metalworking plant began in the 1930s: the neighboring buildings were demolished, and in their place new buildings of the Sickle and Molot plant appeared - a shape-casting, sizing and strip-rolling shop.
The Hammer and Sickle plant was an exemplary enterprise of its time, where not only a record number of products were produced, but also new technologies were constantly invented and introduced. So, in 1932, for the first time in the country, the production of a strip of thickness 0.1-1.0 mm from stainless steel was mastered at a new cold-rolling mill. And in 1949 the world's first technology for using oxygen to intensify open-hearth steel production was developed, for which its authors were awarded the USSR State Prize of the first degree.
The plant underwent a second large-scale reconstruction already in the 1970s, as a result of which "Hammer and Sickle" abandoned open-hearth furnaces, fully automated its production and switched to the manufacture of products from high-alloy and stainless steel grades. Extensive new industrial and warehouse construction has developed along the Entuziastov Highway: a large cable research institute has been erected on the site of one- or two-story buildings.
Newest time
The glory of an advanced enterprise passed in the 1990s, when the volume of production was significantly reduced: economic and political realities made their own adjustments. Almost the main activity of the plant was the leasing of its premises, which, in turn, gradually led to the natural decline of the territory. The talks about the need for a comprehensive reconstruction of the "triangle" have been going on since the early 2000s: the city has repeatedly planned to place offices and shopping centers here, in 2006 there was even an idea to move one of the Moscow railway stations here (more precisely, to restore the Nizhegorodsky railway station that once existed in this area). However, all these projects remained on paper, and the only large-scale work that was going on in the immediate vicinity of the stopped plant was the construction of the Third Transport Ring.
Actually, it was the appearance of such an important transport artery as the Third Transport Ring here that made the city authorities pay close attention to the half-abandoned territory of the plant. Since 2007, the Moscow Government has begun to study possible scenarios for the reorganization of the industrial zone. The Serpa and Molot development projects have been developed several times since then, the last two options were considered in April this year by the Moscow Architectural Council.
Then two planning projects were submitted to the council - a plot of the former territory of the plant with an area of 19 hectares and a site with an area of 53 hectares (it is into such unequal triangles that the industrial zone "Hammer and Sickle" is divided by the Third Transport Ring). In the first part, the authors of the planning project (State Unitary Enterprise NIiPI Masterplan and the PROEKTUS company) proposed to place a multifunctional complex and trade and exhibition complexes. The members of the Architectural Council unanimously recommended rejecting these projects, including due to the colossal disunity of the two territories, which in the urban planning sense can and should be a single whole. Improvements, according to experts, also required the transport scheme, the typology of buildings and the environmental component of the projects. In order to create a "socially controlled, not socially isolated space", as well as taking into account the huge potential of this site for the city, the Architectural Council recommended the developer to make the development of an architectural and urban planning concept the subject of an international competition.
