Frunze Street is a street in Nizhegorodsky District of Nizhny Novgorod. Before the Revolution it was called Kizevetterskaya — after Georg Ivanovich Kizevetter, the first municipal architect of Nizhny Novgorod [1]. The 1972 city directory also records a second former name for the street: Zaychikha [2].

A street named after an architect

Pre-revolutionary Nizhny Novgorod followed a single rule when bestowing commemorative street names: a street was named after someone who had contributed to the city. That is how Mistrovskaya appeared — named after General I. I. Mistrov, a veteran of Suvorov's campaigns (now Akademika Blokhinoy Street); Perepletchikoskaya — named after the merchant and philanthropist F. P. Perepletchikov (now Pushkina Street); Gotmanovskaya — named after the urban-planning engineer P. D. Gotman (now Kostina Street); and Kizevetterskaya [1].

Georg Kizevetter held the post of municipal architect from 1836 to 1846. More than a hundred buildings in Nizhny Novgorod were constructed to his designs, predominantly private residences and income-generating apartment buildings on the central streets [3].

The name change

In the Soviet period the street was renamed after Mikhail Frunze; it appears under that name in the 1972 city directory "Streets of the City of Gorky" [2]. The historic name was never restored — unlike Bolshaya Pokrovskaya and Rozhdestvenskaya, which had their historic names returned in 1995 [4]. A complete list of municipal renamings is compiled in the article Renamings of Streets and Squares of Nizhny Novgorod.

Buildings

In 1996, an administrative building was constructed on Frunze Street to a design by Alexander Kharitonov — the chief architect of Nizhny Novgorod from 1992 to 1999 and a key figure of the Nizhny Novgorod architectural school of the 1990s, whose buildings in the historic center were considered among the finest in Russia at the time [5].

Sources

  1. biblmr.r52.ru — Centralized Library System of Moskovsky District — Virtual Tour of the Streets of Nizhny Novgorod: history, old names, and legends (archive)
  2. universalinternetlibrary.ru — Streets of the City of Gorky: a reference guide, 1972 (archive)
  3. opentextnn.ru — Kucherova T. "The First" among the "Chief": Georg Kizevetter, the first municipal architect of Nizhny Novgorod (archive)
  4. V gorode N — Streets with a history: how the names of old Nizhny Novgorod are being restored (archive)
  5. Kommersant (Volga Region) — Alexander Kharitonov: principal completed projects in Nizhny Novgorod