Filling the Zaryadye District

The Zaryadye district lies in the center of Moscow, to the south of Red Square. It has been unoccupied since 2007.

Leaving the walls of the Kremlin, we walk along the banks of the Moskva River to the east. To our left, we see a unoccupied area, a strange vacancy within the tightly packed city center. Its barren soil is flecked with mud and construction cranes.

This empty area is all that remains of Moscow’s historical Zaryadye district. From the 14^th century onward, it served as a trading center for the city’s merchants and traders within the central Kitai-gorod fortress, as well as a home for the city’s Jewish population [1]. In 1947, however, the district’s historic buildings were razed to make way for an eighth member of the “Seven Sisters” skyscrapers. When this project fell through, the site was instead filled by the immense Rossiya hotel during the 1960s. Since the demolition of this structure in 2007 [2], Zaryadye has stood unoccupied.

An 1881 map of the district shows the tightly-packed residential and commercial buildings that would later be demolished.

The district’s palpable emptiness seems to underscore the failure of the Stalinist master plan. Yet Zaryadye’s historic and cultural legacy is not entirely lost: a 1961 archaeological periodical noted that “[l]arge construction projects in the suburb of Zaryadye have led to such discoveries as rows of dwellings and mercantile establishments dating from the twelfth to seventeenth century” [3]. In other words, the Rossiya’s construction helped unearth hidden archaeological discoveries that shed additional light on the district’s history. As historians Pavel Kupriyanov and Lyudmila Sadovnikova argue, the district’s development caused Muscovites to re-evaluate its importance:

A depiction of the winning proposal, by architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Future plans for the Zaryadye site may add a new layer to its extensive history. The current government intends to convert the space into Moscow’s first new park in fifty years, and has held a competition to identify a designer for this space [5]. The construction of this park will once again repurpose Zaryadye for a new regime’s economic and social agenda.