heaven and hell, part II

I don't take pictures of the really hellish scenes you see here, because they're usually so depressing that I want to throw myself into a canal. But these pictures give you an idea of the "other Petersburg." This is how I remember the city: crumbling sidewalks and houses. But there's also something really beautiful about the disrepair here. Click on these pictures to see the full detail of peeling paint and crumbling stones, and you'll see what I mean.

These houses are in my neighborhood. The unusual rounded edges clearly mark them as experimental architecture of the 1920s. But they're falling apart.



This house is in the neighboorhood where I lived in 2001 and 2003. This area, memorialized by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment, has changed more than any other part of the city. When I first arrived, the square was covered by trash and drunken, bruised vagrants. The metro station, which had collapsed several years before, killing a dozen or so people, was still being rebuilt. The neighborhood is now absolutely posh. But this house, which was always my favorite--so interesting to look at!--remains in its original state of disrepair.


A typical St. Pete building.