Alleys of Moscow. Not even a street, but just a pinch
Shchipok Street is another exception in our cycle of capital lanes, alas, only a few. But not only because, like Bolshaya Bronnaya, it only connects others - Dubininskaya Street with Stremyanny Lane. Pinch Street, not even in my own way stories or architecture, but in terms of lifestyle - this is a real Moscow lane, and once it was a lane through the backyards.
Zamoskvoretsky Shchipok, with a length of only 650 meters, for some reason enlisted in the streets, has to thank the customs officers for its original name. It was their duty to probe the goods and luggage on the border of the Earthen City, which came to the Mother See from the rich south. So that no one slips through without paying a fee.
Once upon a time, the beginning of the street was decorated with its own extraordinary graffiti, simply smeared after it began to wear off. Today, customs officers on Shchipka were replaced by representatives of office plankton and students.
But the spirit of the street, which, thanks to the students of Pleshka and several other universities and colleges, is more businesslike than quiet and cozy, has not changed much, I repeat. Housing on the street has become significantly smaller, and it hardly makes sense to wander along it, but there is where to sit down and have a bite to eat.
The pinch became a street, not dirty, but paved, first with a hewn, then with a stone, only after the fire of 1812. The very rapidly growing city swallowed up the vegetable gardens on the outer side of the Garden Ring, at the same time, at Shchipka, the direction was clearly defined - to Serpukhovka, where goods from the Derbenevskaya embankment and textile factories were transported along this street.
Since then, Shchipok has been rebuilt more than once, but a lot of old buildings remain here, starting with the former New Pobeda factory and the almshouse of the merchants Solodovnikovs, converted into offices, and ending with tenement houses and the forgotten Alexander Hospital.
Interestingly, the hospital received its solid name after the recovery of Tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich, the future Emperor Alexander III the Peacemaker, who had contracted typhus. And over the years, the famous Vishnevsky Institute of Surgery has grown out of the hospital, one of the old buildings of which goes directly to Shchipok (photo).
In the basement of one of the tenement houses on Shchipka, at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, Iskra was printed, but the museum was not opened there, unlike the well-known museum of the underground printing house on Lesnaya (see photo). On the street, their mechanical workshop, which grew into a factory, was built by the Germans from Hanover, the Bromley brothers, in the middle of the XNUMXth century.
Historically, the businesses in the area have coexisted with what are now called social institutions, and hence with churches. None of them survived on Shchipka, but two three-star hotels appeared at once, which is due to the proximity to the Paveletsky railway station and the Plekhanov Institute.
Practically on Shipka there are not so many visible traces left of the hospital town, which combined the almshouse and the very Alexander Hospital. All of its surviving buildings simply disappeared among the new buildings of the Vishnevsky Institute.
From the crossroads with Bolshoy Strochenovsky Lane, not far from the local baths, once famous no worse than Sanduny, a very spectacular view opens up on the Pinch. If it were not for the blind fence, everything looks almost like the legendary St. Petersburg Five Corners (see photo).
However, Shchipok takes its beginnings from five corners - since Bolshoy Stremyanny Lane also goes aside from the same intersection near the Plekhanov Institute. Today there is a lot of service on Shchipok Street, and the one that is called elite prevails - beauty salons and visa centers.
But there is in the yards and something more worthy of mention.
Firstly, this is a little-known monument with a tank T-34-85 in the schoolyard on Shchipka, although with the official address on Dubininskaya Street.
So, without too much pathos, it was decided to perpetuate the memory of the 4th Panzer Army, General V. M. Badanov, who, after being wounded, was replaced by D. D. Lelyushenko. The 4th TA later became the guards - the 4th guards. TA and reached Berlin. She, more precisely, her administration and almost all non-tank units and subunits, were formed right here, in Zamoskvorechye.
The 4th Panzer received dozens and even hundreds of exactly these thirty-fours of the latest modification, with an 85-mm cannon and reinforced armor. These tanks, having lost a little in speed and maneuverability, were no longer targets for the German Pz-6 "Tigers", and with the Pz-5 "Panthers" they fought at least on an equal footing.
Six black marble slabs, which are regularly covered with flowers and carefully preserved, remind of the main operations of Soviet tankers. July 1943 - Kozelsk, formation; March 1944 - Kamenetz-Podolsk; July 1944 - Lviv; August 1944 - Ratibor; January 1945 - Sandomierz; and finally May 1945 - the capture of Berlin (pictured).
The only pity is that the tank is hidden among the greenery, and you can get to it only through the school gate with the access button, let's say, not quite freely. There are not so many tanks and cannons in the capital, and this monument is generally known, it seems, only at school number 627.
And yet - know the veterans of the 4th Guards. TA, their descendants and a few local ones. But together with the tank, the legendary 45-mm anti-tank gun, the "forty-five", also reached Berlin, immediately took a position.
Secondly, this is the memory of the great director Andrei Tarkovsky, to put it bluntly, almost destroyed without trial and without a trace. Once upon a time, activists stood up to protect his house, which was hardly suitable for restoration (see photo), but bulldozers walked over them and along Tarkovsky, as they say.
Here it is worth recalling that the zealous metropolitan public utilities almost covered up the graffiti known to all caring people, not on Shchipka, but not far away - in 1st Shchipkovsky Lane. On it is an image of the director's friend, actor Oleg Yankovsky, with a candle in the wall opening, as in the film Nostalgia.
Today no one lights a candle, and the graffiti is still alive, although getting to it is another quest. The wall itself with a candle behind the fence, which is regularly broken into and just as regularly repaired. And this is on the hospital backdrops, where you have to turn twice - first from Shchipka, and then from the first lane to the second, leaving the slightly pompous building of the gynecological clinic on the left.
And the same thing was done with Tarkovsky and Yankovsky for the sake of saving money, apparently, because maintaining works of architecture and art in a decent form is too expensive for Moscow, which is by no means poor.
And finally, thirdly, this is the museum of Sergei Yesenin, the state one, although opened by enthusiasts on the 100th anniversary of the poet, but, as one might expect, taken under the wing of our bureaucracy. And hidden, moreover, with the back wall to Pinch, in the courtyard of another commercial clinic.
Pinch, more precisely, the neighboring Bolshoy Strochenovsky Lane, is Yesenin's only address in Moscow, where he not only lived, but was registered, moreover, together with his father. The old capital was never a stranger to Yesenin, and one more address of the poet - in Chernyshevsky Lane (photo), where he visited the Surikov literary and artistic circle, will be told later.
Here, on the outskirts of Shchipka, no less than a memorial exposition, it is important quite accurately, although not without loss, the atmosphere of old Yesenin's Moscow recreated in a tiny courtyard. The one where
The low house hunched over without me
My old dog is long gone.
In Moscow's curved streets
To die, to know, God judged me.
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