Recall that the officials are planning to clean up the territory of the former port before the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The cranes were cut for scrap at the end of last year, but the general public of the city took responsibility for the fate of the warehouses along the Volga and Oka. The task of the public organization "Open Strelka" is to convince the authorities to abandon their usual decisions, to switch to effective urban development based on the involvement of citizens in this process.
The public initiated the study and publication of the history of warehouse structures along the Volga: there is documentary evidence,
that these are fragments of the Central Pavilion of the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition of 1896. Open Strelka also agreed on archival research on reinforced concrete warehouses along the Oka, built in the 1930s. Galina Filimonova's “To Understand” Foundation showed a professional interest in this work, and, unlike officials who cite the lack of materials in the archives, began to collect the missing information.
Galina Filimonova found out that documents related to the development of the Strelka territory and its transformation into the Gorky river port in the first half of the 20th century are in the Russian State Archive of Economics in Moscow. “Judging by the materials of several cases that I managed to study,” Galina said, “the general principles of the port development were developed in 1931 by the State Institute for Design and Research in Water Transport (Giprovodtrans). This institute was located in Leningrad and was directly subordinate to the People's Commissariat of Water Transport of the USSR (People's Commissariat for Water Transport)."
In the late 1960s, the warehouses along the Oka were modernized. In the State Archive of Special Documentation of the Nizhny Novgorod Region, survey materials with dimensional drawings of the structures of these reinforced concrete warehouses have been preserved. The folder with the drawings allowed the architect Zoya Rurikova to make sketches of a possible reconstruction of the buildings.
Back in February, at the scientific and practical conference “Strelka's Cultural Codes”, historian Natalya Bakhareva emphasized the family ties of three-nave warehouses with exhibition, modern universal spaces. Now we can not only imagine it, but also see it.
