The Red Triangle

This morning I was thinking how to start this post, how best to characterise this place and a funny comparison suddenly occurred to me. If someone in our city feels that he or she lacks communion with nature, he or she goes for a walk in one of the city parks. We have wonderful parks and forest parks to suit every taste. If he lacks impressions of art, he goes to a museum. One can go to the Hermitage, one can visit the Museum of Ethnography or some branch museum. And when suddenly there is a thought that everything around is too clean and you want to take a walk among abandoned buildings, there is also the most suitable place for such mood in the city - it is the old factory Red Triangle.

The Red Triangle factory occupies an area approximately equal to the area of the nearby Ekaterinhof Park (Ekaterinhof is one of the former imperial residences). I don't know what else to compare it to - the cold numbers are easy to find out on Wikipedia, but they don't give you an understanding of the scale. The Red Triangle Factory is really a triangle in shape between the Obvodny Channel Embankment, Staro-Petergofsky Prospekt and Rosenstein Street. The sides of this triangle are approximately the same. There is a city bus route along the Obvodnoy Canal Embankment, and you will count four bus stops while travelling along the plant's boundary. There are more than 150 factory buildings on the territory of the plant.

The factory was founded in the middle of the 19th century - it was then that the ‘Partnership of Russian-American Rubber Manufactory’ was established, it developed and operated throughout the second half of the 19th and the entire 20th century. The specialisation of the enterprise was the production of rubber products. The most popular of such products are rubber boots and galoshes, and the average person usually associates the brand ‘Red Triangle’ with waterproof footwear, but the range of products, of course, was much wider. Like many other factories in our city, this plant could not survive the 1990s and was bankrupted. Some of the old buildings have been adapted for use by small tenants, other buildings continue to deteriorate.

The old factory is popular among street artists and filmmakers. Sometimes it is hard to guess what you see - an art object or the remains of scenery after the shooting of another film. Around the centre of this industrial complex you can find an abandoned railway platform. If you don't pay attention to details, you may not notice it, from the outside it looks like just a platform with a canopy. The rails have long been dismantled, but if you look closely you can see the remains of wooden sleepers. Wandering between the industrial buildings, one can suddenly come to a small outbuilding, preserved from the time when no factory existed yet. The plot along the Peterhof Road once belonged to the senator Count Alexander Stroganov. The estate house and park were located here.