The next day, together with the rest of the military divisions, the Emperor of France himself entered the city. According to the testimony of Abbot Segur, a rector of the French Catholic Church of St. Louis in Moscow, a fire in the city broke out the evening of September 2 and early morning of September 3 at the Gostiny Dvor on Ilyinka and Solyanka. On September 3, the fire spread rapidly, aided by a strong wind. Zaryadye was in the path of the blaze and turned into ashes with scorched skeletons of stone building frames left standing here and there.
The fires drove out the French but left the ancient city devastated. In 1813, Empower Alexander I ordered by decree to establish a “Commission to Rebuild Moscow“. In the 1810s, Moscow and in particular the Zaryadye neighborhood experienced more rapid changes in urban and architectural experience than ever before. Architect Osip Beauvais oversaw the reconstruction, which was based off a design book issued by the Ministry of the Interior in 1809-1810 that standardized building facades built across the Russian empire. The sketchbook contained facade standards for buildings of different size and purpose: palaces, two, three, and four-story tenements with trading stalls, workshops, coachbuilders, stables, and barns. Lending for private developers was facilitated through the Trustee Council. The “Commission to Rebuild Moscow“ supervised the construction of five brick factories which provided developers with supplies on credit.
In Zaryadye, several stone buildings, including many brick chambers from the 16th and 17th centuries, structurally survived the fire of 1812. The well-constructed buildings’ shells and frameworks were used to rebuild after the fire. As a result, many basements, walls, and arches from the era that preceded Peter the Great such as the Old English Court, the Palace of the Romanov Boyars on the territory of the Znamensky Monastery, the chambers on the corner of Zaryadevsky and Yershov streets, and the chambers and Church of Nikolay Chudotvorets (the Miracle Worker) — were all drastically rebuilt and hidden under the neoclassical facades of the first half of the nineteenth century.
in 1819, and the trenches around the Kitay Gorod wall were filled in.
In the process of filling in the ground and trenches, the once curvy and winding Varvarka was significantly leveled and straightened. At the time, in 1819, in order to extend the thoroughfare from Moskvoretsky Street to wooden Moskvoretsky Bridge, either the ancient aqueduct or the doublewide gates of Kitay Gorod were demolished. In the mid-1820s, the Kitaygorosky road was built where there used to be trenches and ramparts. The transit way was then slightly larger than it is today. The refurbished the Kitay Gorod tower wall along the thoroughfare by bleaching it a bright white color.
The original Moscow reconstruction plan, designed by architect V.I. Geste, envisaged transferring the brick and wooden bread trading stalls attached to the Kitay Gorod all to another place in the city. However, Moscow governor Count Fyodor Rostopchin, who defended the interests of the warehouse owners — a large landowning class — didn’t agree with the architect. Rostopchin proposed building new bread shops “on the backside of the Kitay Gorod wall“, and worked an agreeable facade model which “gave them the appearance of fitting in with the ancient wall and strengthening the majestic tower.“ Geste was sidelined from the project and the new head, Osip Beauvais, developed a general project template for the bread stalls based on the standardized Empire-wide facade model. The entire exterior of the Kitay Gorod wall along the embankment was developed using this template up until 1820, effectively stunting development for an entire century.
From 1823 to 1824, the Kremlin and Moskvoretsky embankments were reconstructed and “lined with stone“ for the first time since the end of Catherine the Great’s reign. The walls of the embankments were covered in cut stones. Staircases and passages to the river were added to the Moskvoretsky embankment in the Zaryadye neighborhood as a source to extinguish fires as well as to unload cargoes arriving on the river. Most importantly, wholesale grain was stored in the stalls along the waterfront. Many trees were planted alongside the embankment after the restoration.
Before that, water trucks would drive around the city and sell drinking water in barrels. Many townspeople dug wells on their land. The Moscow city water pipeline – a system of water retention, aqueducts, and pipelines – supplied drinking water from the Moscow region to a network of fountains located in the streets and squares in the city. Moscow residents visited these fountains and basins, bringing home water in buckets for cooking and other basic needs. Often, city dwellers had to walk pretty far to a water source and wait in lines. Townspeople continued to buy clean water from water wagons until all the neighborhoods were outfitted with water fountains. A water fountain was built on Zaryadsky Lane in 1843 as a branch of the Mytishchi water pipeline. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, the fountain “resembled a sink attached to a wall” on one of the houses. Before this water source, for ten years the closest clean water fountain to Zaryadye was on Varvarka Square. Additionally, some Zaryadye residents had wells on their private estates and church compounds – Znamensky Monastery was especially famous for its water source. For some reason, the water had a salty taste, which is why, even after a public fountain came to Zaryadsky Lane, locals still preferred the monastery’s water to preserve cucumbers and other pickled vegetables for winter.
