MOSCOW’S GREEN SPACE NEXT TO RED SQUARE
▶ After decade-long dispute, prestigious land neighbouring Kremlin reopened as public park
Moscow yesterday opened a park to the public, just steps from the Kremlin, despite criticism over its huge price tag.
Zaryadye Park on the banks of the Moscow River, with features including an ice labyrinth, is the first public park to be built there in 50 years.
It will replace a gigantic Soviet-era hotel that was demolished in 2006.
That left a plot that stood empty for many years as investors and city hall clashed over how the space, valued at more than US$1 billion (Dh3.67bn), would be used.
Spanning a little more than 10 hectares in prime location near Red Square and the Kremlin, the lot was eventually converted into a park because “nothing else worked”, said Alexander Kibovsky, head of the Moscow City department of cultural heritage.
Initially, “nobody had the courage to suggest it could be a park”, Mr Kibovsky said. He said that city leaders were shocked when Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, floated the idea.
“I don’t know another metropolis where they would disregard commercial value and use the territory as a public space. It’s fantastic,” Mr Kibovsky said.
The park consists of a landscape with different botanical, zones including one resembling a tundra, and attractions such as a philharmonic hall concealed beneath a hill with a “glass crust” roof and an ice cave with a labyrinth.
“Since we have a lot of territory beyond the Arctic circle, we are showing it here,” Mr Kibovsky said.
Pavel Trekhleb, the park’s director, pointed out that climate control for the park’s southern plants would be provided by infrared lanterns, while fish in the park’s pond would be restocked every week.
“You can come with a fishing pole and get fish for dinner,” Mr Trekhleb said.
Zaryadye Park is one element of the mayor’s push to remake Moscow, which has turned the city of about 12 million into a vast building site over the past few years.
Other initiatives include a $62.1bn plan to raze thousands of Soviet-era prefabricated apartment blocks, the $2bn project to revamp Moscow’s central streets and the $3.5bn new train line connecting some of the outlying neighbourhoods.
Compared with these expenditures, the park’s budget of 14bn roubles seems modest. But critics have called some of its pricier elements frivolous when the country is trying to recover from recession.
“What a scale. That’s two annual budgets of Tver [a city north of Moscow] on one park,” Alexey Nikonov wrote on Facebook.
The park ended up costing almost three times the original budget.
“No money in the budget to pay salaries to doctors, pensions in the provinces are minuscule, while Moscow is behaving like a fat cat,” posted another critic, Svetlana Popova.
Historically, the Zaryadye district was a bustling merchant quarter and became a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in the late 19th century.
But after Jews were forcibly moved out of the Russian capital in 1892, Zaryadye began to disintegrate and the Soviet authorities decided to knock it down.
It was replaced by the Rossiya Hotel in 1967, which then was the biggest in the world, with 3,182 rooms.
The park has different geobotanical zones, as well as a philharmonic hall under a hill with a ‘glass crust’ roof