Alexander Nevsky Square

Designed as part of the development of the monastery in the late 18th century, the square had received its name by at least 1784, and was laid out in the 1790s with the building of the Gate Church, and the establishment of a stone wall boundary.

The area was redeveloped in the 1960s with the completion of the Alexander Nevsky Bridge, and the opening of the Hotel Moscow [ru] and the metro station Ploshchad Alexandra Nevskogo.

Another metro station, Ploshchad Alexandra Nevskogo-2, opened in the 1980s and in 2002 long-held plans for a monument to Alexander Nevsky came to fruition with the installation of a bronze equestrian sculpture in the square.

The square was likely laid out by the diocese architect Ivan Starov in the latter half of the eighteenth century to provide access from the main road through the city, Nevsky Prospekt, and the developing monastery complex.

[1] By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the square had become rundown and was considered a disreputable area, housing grain barns and tram tracks.

[1] A popular urban legend of the 1920s recorded how a cab driver and his horse tried to pass through the area at night, with only their skeletons, gnawed clean by rats, found the following day.

[1][3][4] The area was redeveloped after the opening of the Alexander Nevsky Bridge on 5 November 1965, with the demolition of the older buildings and the construction of the Ploshchad Alexandra Nevskogo metro station and the Hotel Moscow [ru].

[1][2] On 9 May 2002, as part of the 300th anniversary celebrations of Saint Petersburg, a bronze equestrian statue of Alexander Nevsky was unveiled in the square.

[6] In 1987 he submitted a bronze version to a competition to build a Nevsky monument in Ust-Izhora, the supposed site of the Battle of the Neva, but the design was not selected.