Central St. Petersburg has always impressed me because of the large number of remarkable sites concentrated in a relatively small area. For instance, from the eastern tip of Vasilievsky Island, I could see all at once the gleaming cupola of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the towering steeple of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the resplendent facade of the Winter Palace. During my two month trip in St. Petersburg this summer, I lived with a host family on the opposite side of Vasilievsky, in an area called Primorskaya due to our proximity to the Primorskaya metro station. The city center is only 20 minutes away by metro, including walk time to the station, and slightly more by bus. When I first arrived in Primorskaya from a two-day orientation session in the center, however, I felt as if I wasn’t even in the same city. Compared to the brilliance of the center, Primorskaya seemed to me like just a bunch of ugly apartment buildings.

I had been to St. Petersburg for a short time in April 2012 on an exchange through my high school, but this trip had given me a fairly narrow view of the city. I was chaperoned everywhere, so I only paid attention to my surroundings when I was told to, i.e. at famous tourist sites. These places were particularly impressive to me, as I had never really strayed too far from my home town – a pristine Connecticut suburb – before this trip. Colonial houses with well-tended lawns were simply not comparable to the Russian Emperors’ residences. Thus, my mental image of St. Petersburg was only slightly better than a tourist guide, and my predictable first reaction on seeing Primorskaya was, “Well, that’s pretty ugly.”

And it’s true that Primorskaya is not, at first, all that visually appealing. This district features almost exclusively hulking concrete constructions with prominent stains that reveal their age. Some buildings, including the one I lived in, are covered with blue and white tiles, but their frequently damaged and dirtied state adds to the sense of dilapidation instead of providing the area with a refreshing splash of color. The buildings in Primorskaya are only about ten to fifteen stories tall, due to a law that prohibits any structure from being above a certain height, but they are tall enough to effectively block the horizon. Even though I lived not two minutes from the Gulf of Finland, the view from my window showed only a sea of asphalt and cement.

The interiors of Primorskaya apartments are actually quite nice, nicer than some apartments closer to the center of the city. (Because the rent is lower, families have more money to maintain the inside of their homes.) My host family’s apartment was no exception. However, in order to get there, every day I had to walk past street after street of Primorskaya’s dreary apartment buildings. In the first few weeks of my stay, this never failed to set off in my head a constant refrain of “This is ugly, this is ugly, this is ugly.”

After a while, though, Primorskaya’s lack of visual appeal stopped bothering me, and I began to appreciate my little part of St. Petersburg. The dvor (in this context, a courtyard) in my apartment complex was essentially a small park, whereas in the city center a dvor can be simply a small patch of concrete. And because the dvor was not an official park, the greenery was allowed to grow and to thrive without human interference. It also had a small playground, and after school I would often see families with young children playing together, in a city where young children are fairly rare. Walking around Primorskaya, I found out the inhabitants of my neighborhood had a propensity for large dogs, even though St. Petersburg tends to be a cat city. One day I even thought I saw someone walking a Newfoundland, a breed big enough to be mistaken for bears. I often saw people carrying groceries home; five minutes down the street was Lenta, the closest Russian equivalent to an American supermarket.

The come and go of Primorskaya’s residents seemed to be regulated by the work day. In the morning on weekdays, there was a constant crowd of people waiting at the bus/ trolleybus/ tram stop two blocks from my house. If they were late, they might hail a marshrutka – a kind of private bus that is usually faster and runs more varied routes than normal buses, but is more expensive. On the weekends, however, the bus stop was surprisingly empty, with buses running less often and sometimes with modified routes, and even the constant flow of marshrutki was noticeably diminished.

Primorskaya became an anchor for me in a place that was fast-paced and often unpredictable. There was a certain comfort knowing that when I came home at the end of the day, no matter where I had gone or what had happened, these buildings would be standing completely unchanged. So no, it didn’t have any gilded domes or marble columns, and not even one well-trimmed bush, but I discovered that chipped blue tile and stained concrete were more than enough to make a home.

Photo © Emily Paruolo. All rights reserved.

Emily is a Comparative Literature major, her primary interest being the influence of Western European ideas on Russian culture. She has studied both French and Russian for eight years and began studying German this fall. She hopes to return to St. Petersburg next fall.

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