population and, in sharp contrast to Moscow, only half of a percentage were clergy.
The city had a major convent and monastery and numerous Orthodox churches,
but Orthodoxy had hardly the presence of old Moscow.
Unlike traditional circular cities, St. Petersburg built its center around the
Neva, mapping on paper a cohesive urban ensemble oriented around impressive
neoclassical state buildings on either side of the river. The Peter Paul Fortress
with its impressive spire faced the ever extending rococo facade of the Winter
Palace, completed by Catherine II’s more classical Hermitage Theater in 1787.
The eastern tip of Vasilii Island and its embankment with a glittery array of
Academy of Arts, Menshikov Palace, Twelve Colleges, Academy of Sciences, and
Kunstkammer faced the immense Admiralty building and its active shipyard, the
Senate Building, and Catherine II’stributetoPeterI,theBronze Horseman
statue (1782). On written maps the city’s famed radial boulevards and planned
streets strike the eye, but in many ways it was water that shaped neighborhoods
in St. Petersburg. Over the century the city center developed with aboutfive
administrative districts, surrounded by less densely settled areas. Most presti-
gious was the Admiralty neighborhood, between the Neva and the Fontanka
Canal, home not only to shipbuilding but also to impressive imperial residences,
noble palaces, and the English Embankment with opulent urban townhouses of
British merchants. Most foreigners, however, lived across the river at the eastern
tip of Vasilii Island, where ports, a commodity exchange, custom house, and
warehouses served international trade. Here also lived the many state servitors in
the colleges and academy. Farther south along Nevskii Prospect were the
Foundry and Moscow Districts, on either side of Nevskii Prospect and east of
theFontanka;thesewereplacesofindustryandemporiafordomestictradeand
home to merchants and middling gentry. The center’sfinal major districts were
the St. Petersburg and Vyborg sides north of the Neva, also places of industry
and home to middling people.
As in Moscow, beyond the city center stretched a myriad of less neatly developed
areas. To the north were more open spaces used for court gardens, pasture, and
noble estates; some neighborhoods attached to chanceries (slobody) in thefirst half
of the century had been absorbed into the city by Catherine II’s time. To the south
and east along the Neva teemed squalid neighborhoods of artisans and peasants
who provided basic labor and services for the burgeoning city. Industry was
scattered throughout the city, in the Admiralty and Foundry neighborhoods, Vasilii
Island, and increasingly by the end of the century in the Moscow District down
Nevskii Prospect.
Urban government in St. Petersburg was even less cohesive as that of Moscow,
given that St. Petersburg had no traditional artisan and merchant commune (posad)
to provide the backbone of city government. Neighborhoods were less cohesive
than in Moscow, with tremendous population turnover, but as in Moscow for most
of the century the basic structures of governance were the Magistracy (for merchant
and artisans) and neighborhood self-government. Neighborhoods did the familiar
tasks: they maintained streets and street lighting, carried out night watch, took care
of sanitation. In Catherine II’s time, however, St. Petersburg developed some more
Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform 389