Syezzhy Dom — a police precinct and fire station building constructed in 1836–1839 on Bolshaya Pecherskaya Street, 34a/34b in Nizhny Novgorod. It is a regionally significant architectural monument. The main building has survived to the present day, and it still houses a fire station.[1][3]

Architecture and construction

The building was erected to a design by the first town architect of Nizhny Novgorod, Georg Ivanovich Kiesewetter (1808–1857). The model used was a facade plan sent from Saint Petersburg and drawn up by the architect P. Visconti.[3]

The main building, seven windows wide, had on its first floor three arched central entrances, and on the second floor windows with triangular pediments and an attic. Above the attic rose a wooden watchtower with three tiers of observation galleries. Adjoining the main volume were single-storey stables with five arched entrances facing the square.[3] The building combined the functions of a fire station and a police precinct.[1]

The construction of the Syezzhy Dom fell at the very beginning of Kiesewetter's tenure as town architect, a post established in Nizhny Novgorod in 1836. In those same years, the first income and private houses were built to his designs on Alekseyevskaya, Bolshaya Pechyorskaya, Ilyinskaya, Rozhdestvenskaya, Kozhevennaya, and other central streets of the city — over the 19th century, more than a hundred buildings were constructed to Kiesewetter's designs in all.[1]

Present-day condition

Only the main building has survived to the present day: the wooden watchtower has been lost, and the single-storey stables have likewise not survived.[1][3] A fire station still occupies the surviving part.[3] The building is located in an area historically associated with the old Sennaya Square (near the present-day Dobrolyubov Linguistics University (NGLU)).[1]

Sources

  1. opentextnn.ru — Kucherova T. "First" Among the "Chief Ones": Georg Kiesewetter, the first town architect of Nizhny Novgorod — OTKRYTY TEKST (archive)
  2. autotravel-nn.ru — Syezzhy Dom in Nizhny Novgorod (archive)
  3. mapy.com