Moscow Row
A trading row along the Moscow line.
The Moscow Row — the longest of the Hill's trading rows — stretched along what is today Universytetska Street. Raised in the first half of the 19th century on the site of wooden stalls, it was a masonry arcade with more than thirty shops under a single roof and an arched gallery running the length of the façade. It housed the shops of Muscovite merchants who kept Kharkiv branches of their houses: they brought textiles, china, tea, spices, sugar and candles in long convoys from the imperial first capital through Kursk and Belgorod.
Through the entire 19th century the Moscow Row was the principal channel through which Sloboda Ukraine received the industrial wares of central Russia: Morozov printed cloth, copperware from the Tula workshops, Kuznetsov porcelain, Wissotzky tea from Moscow. By the turn of the 20th century the traditional shops were joined by stores selling sewing machines, Underwood typewriters, the first gramophones. The row teemed with life seven days a week: Moscow merchants even kept their 'own' coachmen, clerks and cooks here, lodged in dormitories on the upper floor.
The First World War, the revolution and the Civil War one after another cut down trading capital. Nationalisation in 1919 turned the row into a guberniya trade-union warehouse, and later into repair workshops. In the 1930s the Soviet rebuilding of the centre erased the Moscow Row together with its neighbours — the Sergiivskyy, Novo-Sergiivskyy and Fur Rows; the move of the capital to Kyiv in 1934 accelerated the neglect of the historic core. The bombings of 1941—1943 destroyed whatever remained; post-war construction closed off the view of the Hill with low industrial blocks, and the row's silhouette never returned.
