Kontorskyy Bridge
The Kontorskyy Bridge was built in 1888 as a timber crossing of the Lopan, where Kontorska Street meets the embankment (just north of the Grand Hotel). The architect was Boleslav Grigorovych Mikhailovsky — the same Kharkov architect who had built the Stock Exchange on Mykolaivska Square seven years earlier; the funds were raised by the Society of Mutual Credit of Clerks together with two homeowners on Kontorska Street, Burkevich and Yenurovsky. The bridge connected Kontorska with Sergiivska and Pavlovska Squares and immediately became a major transport artery, taking significant load off the over-strained Lopansky Bridge, which had borne the brunt of Kharkov's freight traffic since the railway's arrival.
The Kontorskyy Bridge — also called the Maly Lopansky (Little Lopan) Bridge — had inclined approaches on both sides like the famous "hunchback" bridge, and in bad weather became an "instrument of torture" for horses pulling heavy carts: they slipped on the muddy slopes and fell, so the press and the public called for years for it to be paved with stone. In January 1918 it was the scene of a curious "battle for the Kontorskyy Bridge" between two Bolshevik factions: revolutionary Kronstadt sailors accused the "Red" city leadership of drunkenness at the Versailles restaurant on Kontorska Street 1, both sides called for reinforcement and opened fire from opposite banks of the Lopan. In the late 1930s the bridge's orientation was changed: it had originally stood parallel to the Lopansky Bridge and the north façade of the Grand Hotel, and was now turned perpendicular to the embankment — possibly to favour through traffic to Banny and Torgovy Lanes, and because the 90-degree mount was structurally more reliable.
The bridge did not survive the Second World War. In October 1941 the Kontorskyy Bridge, together with the Lopansky and Moskalevsky Bridges, fell into German hands — mined by the retreating Soviet forces, all three were defused by the occupants. When exactly the bridge was dismantled is not known: on the German map of 1942 it is no longer there. The post-war reconstruction did not return it, and today neither piers nor any trace of the crossing remains on the embankment. Whether a footbridge could anchor a revitalisation of Kontorska Street is a question for present-day Kharkov urbanists.
