Our neighborhood is movin' on up

Nothing says that a neighborhood has arrived like when it gets gleaming new, upscale shopping mall. And our neighborhood is humming with excitement, sort of, because on Saturday the Shchuka “entertainment-shopping complex” will officially open. The multi-story center is right at our Metro station, and will include a McDonalds, a Nike store, an upscale supermarket, and a cineplex. It also includes three levels of underground parking. The thing has been marketed to death. Friday there was an ad insert in the business newspaper Kommersant about it (attached photos).

I do not know what had been on the spot before. But I swear that I remember it being a closed off construction site when I first came to visit in 2003. So I want to say that this project has been a long-time coming. And when we drove in from the Airport along Novoshchukinskaya Shosse at the beginning of the month, this space station of a building towering over the area came as quite a surprise.

Over the past few weeks, I have enjoyed observing the antics of Russian construction workers hard at work. There are the extraordinary number of idle security personnel loafing about, which is mandatory for any public project or civic gathering in Russia. And I’ve admired the steely calm of the guys out on the sidewalk using power saws to trim masonry tiles. Usually one will operate the saw while a friend will hold them in place with his feet while smoking a cigarette. Aside from the bright blue overalls, you’d never know they weren’t guys just playing around with power tools, as of course simple safety precautions like gloves, eye-protectors, or helmets are for sissies (I can imagine the Russian reasoning: “If some guy you work with at a construction site is going to saw your foot off, gloves won’t help you.”). But the real prize is behind the complex, across the tram tracks, in a vacant lot had been turned basically into a tent city for itinerant workers of various ethnic minorities. They live in stacked metal trailers.

But the big picture is even more interesting. Gentrification is an interesting subject here, as Soviet planning did a surprisingly good job of making sure that there wasn’t that much difference between good and bad neighborhoods. There were some distinctions – the center was always desirable, and places with lots of factories tended to be identifiably working class. But for the most part they were mixed up, and everything was a shade of grey. When the Soviet Union fell everyone got the apartment they were living in, and the evolution of the real estate market has been slow and agonizing and will probably take generations to sort out. It has also created a massively screwed up real estate market, with purchase and rental prices that bear no relation whatsoever to the reality of living in Moscow. It allows natives, with typical sadomasochist pride, to crow about how Moscow is the “most expensive city on the planet.”

But gentrification is slowly happening, and in many ways just like how the polarization of wealth here leads people to have very different lives in the same space. Usually, a public space like a park or a lot is used to build a tall condo towers. These buildings have plenty of parking, fences around the perimeter, and around-the-clock guards. But outside, it can be hard to tell where you are. New condos can have glorious views of the neighboring Brezhnez-era monster with its crumbling tiles. The schools are hit and miss and their quality changes from year to year. All this is extremely confusing for a westerner, who is used to spaces that evolve in obvious ways.

Here in Shchukinskaya we are a prime location for gentrification. The area has always been known for its connections with the military and the scientific elites. It has an unusually pleasant physical layout, along the river and separated from Leningradsky Shosse by a few parks. It is quiet, with many sturdy and reasonably sized Stalin-era apartment blocks, and few of the sweeping landscape-killing Khrushchev-era monstrosities that liter other areas.

Incidentally, a ‘shchuka’ is a pike. We are along the Moscow River, and there was a village named Shchukino here that got swallowed up as the city expanded. Our district seal features one of the river fish on top, and the bottom is a stylized cartoon atom, in honor of the Kurchatov Institute, where the Soviet atom bomb was born.