Babich I.L. Moscow Vanished: History of the House by the Arbat Gate

Abstract: The subject of this research is the history of a house in Arbat square. The once-famous house was built by a well-known architect S. M Kalugin, who was the creator of Sandunovsky Bani and other buildings in Moscow. The house was a part of a near-Moscow monastery – Voznesenki Davidov Hermitage. The article contains plans and drawings, the timeline of house’s reconstruction, stories of Muscovites who lived in the house, as well as the functioning of the “Keller and Co” pharmaceutical company, which occupied the house before the Revolution. The house was demolished in the early 1930s, during the reconstruction of Arbat square. This article is written on the basis of archive sources of the Moscow Central Archive, which were discovered and used for the first time. The article’s greatest value is the publication of drawings and building plans from the 19th–20th centuries. This article presents the first ever study on history of the House in Arbat square. The house belonged to a monastery and was little known of. The author has found valuable sources on history of the house and presented its complete history that started in the late 17th century and ended in the 1930s.

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