St. Pete Preservationists Urge Store Boycott

ST. PETERSBURG — Preservationist activists in St. Petersburg have called on consumers to boycott Finnish supermarket chain Stockmann’s latest department store, Stockmann Nevsky Center, saying it has radically altered one of the city’s most treasured historic views.

Three valuable historic buildings — 114 and 116 Nevsky Prospekt and 4 Ulitsa Vosstania — were demolished even though they were in a protected zone, claimed Antonina Yeliseyeva from the preservation activist group Living City.

The activists brought their campaign against Stockmann Nevsky Center to the offices of the Finnish supermarket giant in Helsinki late last week.

Yeliseyeva and Dmitry Litvinov from Living City brought a Dishonored Citizen of St. Petersburg Award to deliver to Jussi Kuutsa, who is in charge of the center project until its launch, scheduled for November.

Kuutsa was development director of the Stockmann Group’s international operations until recently. The award included a diploma and a brick from a demolished historic building.

The project’s management rejected all accusations of wrongdoing Monday.

In a telephone interview, Kuutsa dismissed preservationists’ claims as “wrong,” insisting that Stockmann had secured all the necessary permits from city authorities for the construction.

Apart from the demolition of three historic buildings, the construction has also had a precarious effect on nearby buildings, Yeliseyeva said in a telephone interview Monday.

“There are huge cracks in numbers 112 and 110 on Nevsky, and the residents don’t know if they should move out as the buildings continue to fall apart,” she said.

Yeliseyeva and Litvinov called on the public to boycott the Stockmann Nevsky Center.

The Stockmann project has been surrounded by controversy since 2006, when the first building on the site was stripped of protected status and demolished to make way for the retail and office complex.

St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said the demolished buildings would be recreated in their original form. The facades have been restored to an approximation of their original appearance, Yeliseyeva said, but a 35-meter-tall glass extension has also been built on top of the facades even though city law does not allow any buildings taller than 28 meters in the area.

“This is a new dominant of Nevsky Prospekt which even overshadows the Admiralty,” she said. “Even recently it was impossible to imagine that such a structure could exist on Nevsky.”

St. Petersburg has seen many of its historical neoclassical buildings demolished in recent years and Living City established the Dishonored Citizen of St. Petersburg Award in 2007 to shame people who contribute most to the destruction of the city’s historic appearance.

Previously, the public voted for the award to be given to Alexander Vakhmistrov, former deputy governor in charge of construction, architect Tatyana Slavina, and Vera Dementyeva, head of City Hall’s heritage protection committee. Kuutsa is the first non-Russian to be presented with Living Center’s dishonorable citizen award.

He defended the glass structure on the new building.

“Whether people like it or dislike it is one thing, but they should remember that this glass structure on the top of the roof has been approved by all the city authorities in the required order, and we have all the approvals for that,” Kuutsa said. “And now if somebody doesn’t like it, of course it’s a not a nice thing for us either. But it’s a question of somebody liking ice cream and somebody else not liking ice cream. What can we say about that?”