[7] His mother — Rakhil Moiseevna Gorodnitskaya (1908–1981),[6] — in her youth, was a school maths teacher, then worked as corrector and editor of sailing directions.

In 1972, Gorodnitsky moved from Leningrad to Moscow and started working for the Research Institute of Oceanology named after P.P.

In 1982 and 1984, he took part in expeditions devoted to the search for the legendary Atlantis at the Ampère Seamount in the North Atlantic.

[13] Gorodnitsky's research included numerous dives on bathyscaphes, starting from Hermit Atoll in Papua New Guinea in 1978.

In 1988, during an expedition on the research ship Akademik Mstislav Keldysh in the North Atlantic on the deep-sea apparatus Mir (submersible), he dived to a depth of 4.5 kilometers.

Like Alexander Galich, and unlike other bards, Gorodnitsky composed and sang his songs a cappella for several decades; later, he started playing the guitar.

In 1972, Alexander Gorodnitsky was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers on the recommendations of famous poets Boris Slutsky, David Samoilov, and Vadim Shefner.

Having undergone a nearly 50-year-long evolution, it now presents an organic synthesis of the poetic word with profound philosophical, historical, and scientific intuition to embody in its multi-genre creative system the essential qualities of the modern worldview".

Poems and songs by Alexander Gorodnitsky have been translated into English, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Spanish, German, Polish, French, Czech and other languages.

[9] Many of Alexander Gorodnitsky poems and songs published in post-Soviet period are dedicated to Germany: "Stuttgart" (1998), "Neva-Elbe" (2000), "German castles" (2003), "Johann Sebastian Bach" (2018), "Lüneburg" (2019) and others.

[17] Gorodnitsky opposed the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and had signed the open letter against war, political self-isolation of Russia, restoration of totalitarianism.