The Large Neva

It was not a mere coincidence that Peter the Great liked the beautiful Neva and decided to build his "Paradise" on its banks. The Neva is a quite unusual river. For the ancient Eastern Slavs the Neva was the starting-point of Baltic trade and for the Russian lands it was nearly the only way to Europe in the course of many centuries.

The Neva gave an access to the distant Volga waterway, which led to the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as opened the way to the Dnieper, "from the Varangians to the Greeks". The river is wide and deep and so navigable at its entire course. The prosperity of the new capital largely depended on the Neva, which had become the city's main thoroughfare since its foundation. It does not flood in spring and does not get shallow in summer. Its level is invariably the same regardless of heavy rains or draughts. But the residents of St Petersburg were permanently expecting ruinous calamities from it. Sometimes, as a result of powerful winds blowingfrom the gulf water in the Neva raises to the dangerous level of several metres. That is why even now the city's inhabitants show an interest in the changeful temper of the Neva as before. Peter the Great did not encourage the construction of bridges across the Neva -he believed that St Petersburgers should prefer boats and ships to carriages. The first bridge, mounted on pontoons, was built only after his death, in 1727- Later several other bridges linked the banks of the Neva. The Palace Bridge was the last one to be completed before the Revolution of 1917.

The first bridge across the Neva, a pontoon one, existed until 1916. Installed every year in spring, it changed its position and structure, but still was unreliable and did not match the beauty of the granite embankments. In 1916 it caught fire and its burning fragments were floating down the river. Today, only the bridge's abutments on the embankment remind us of the former structure.

The earliest permanent bridge across the Neva was built in 1850. It was named the Annunciation Bridge after the nearby square (now Labour Square) and the church on it. In 1855 it was renamed the Nicholas Bridge and since 1918 it has been known as the Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge. The seven-arched bridge rested on stone piers faced with granite. The eighth span, near the bank of Vasilyevsky Island, was overlapped by the wings of the raising sections designed in the form of metal trellis girders - structures of this kind were used for the first time in this period. In 1936-38 the bridge had a major repair and its raising section was shifted from the bank to the middle of the Neva.

The present-day bridge does not look like the former one; only the fine openwork railings of cast metal remind us of its original appearance. Half a century later the second metal drawbridge, the Liteiny Bridge, crossed the Neva. It was built in 1874-79 to a project by the engineer A. Struve. The arched structure looked like that of the Nicholas Bridge, but surpassed the latter in dimensions. The raising span with a rotating wing was arranged near the left bank. After the Liteiny Bridge had functioned for nearly ninety years it became too narrow for urban transport and inconvenient for the passage of large cargo ships. The bridge was redesigned in 1965-67, but its former railings made to a project by the architect Karl Rachau have been preserved. The Trinity Bridge was the third metal one to be built across the Neva. Its construction started in 1897. The axis of this bridge lies on the Pulkovo meridian. The entrance to the bridge from the Field of Mars is decorated with two granite obelisks. The major part of the bridge consists of five spans, their dimensions gradually growing with a fine linear rhythm towards the middle of the river. The slender silhouette of the bridge combines with its economical structure and a system of steel girders innovatory for that day. The Art Nouveau design of the bridge is a work of the French architects V. Chabrol and P. Patouillard.