Old warehouses of the Red Cross Society

Brick warehouses for storing sanitary wagons, hospital property and household equipment were built at the very beginning of the XX century, in 1909 - 1911. The site was chosen for utilitarian reasons - not the most beautiful, but the most convenient in terms of transport connections. This plot of land was located near one of the capital's railway stations.

Several one-storey warehouses, garages, workshop buildings, office and residential buildings, as well as a bathhouse and laundry were built for the Russian Red Cross Society. Some of these buildings are still used for almost the same purposes, others stand abandoned. On the facades of the buildings you can distinguish the symbol of a cross made of bricks.

I inspected the buildings from different angles. Even in the empty buildings, almost all the windows and doors were tightly closed. But after a while, I found a door ajar, and was able to go inside one of the abandoned buildings. The large hangar was probably used to store ambulances or lorries.

A little away is the former boiler house and laundry building, with a red brick chimney looming nearby. This building seems to be used as a workshop. Next to it stands a neat two-storey house. It looks like a merchant's mansion, but old maps show that it was a bathhouse.

At the end of the XIX century this area near the railway tracks was a "grey zone", the neighbouring plots were occupied by warehouses, barns and vegetable gardens. By the beginning of the XXI century things have not changed too much, the vegetable gardens have disappeared, but some of the plots in the neighbouring streets still look so that you can easily imagine that you have travelled back a hundred years in a time machine. But that's about to change, with neighbourhood renovations underway.

You can see in some of the photos how much the city has come closer - the new apartment blocks are towering over the old warehouses. The railway station has been closed, the old railway tracks have been removed, and the vacated area is being rapidly developed. The Monument Conservation Commission has listed the old Red Cross Society warehouses as objects of historical, scientific, artistic or other cultural value. I hope that all these buildings will be preserved - but the surrounding area will undoubtedly be transformed soon.