New Sergiivskyy Row
The Novo-Sergiivskyy Row was raised in 1875 on the plot between the staircase up to the hill and the older Sergiivskyy Row — to a design by the architects M. K. Reim and A. A. Tomson. It was a two-storey block: shops below, and a second floor that the city duma, by a resolution of 2 November 1882, handed over to the city Industrial-Artistic Museum. The museum opened on 14 December 1886 — the second provincial public city museum in the Russian Empire, after Saratov, and THE FIRST in Ukraine. Its entrance was arranged from one of the intermediate landings of the staircase that climbed up to University Hill.
The Industrial-Artistic Museum on the Novo-Sergiivskyy Row's second floor lasted through the entire pre-revolutionary period and survived the change of regime: in the Soviet era it was renamed the Museum of the History of Sloboda Ukraine after Hryhoriy Skovoroda. The row itself continued to function as commercial space — haberdashery, leather goods, footwear, umbrellas and walking sticks filled the still-leased ground-floor stalls; the merchant life of Sergievska Square persisted into the NEP years.
The Soviets nationalised the row in 1919. Unlike the Shubny Row and the Fruit Row pavilions, which were demolished as early as the early 1930s during the reconstruction of the central squares, the Novo-Sergiivskyy survived through the pre-war years. The fighting of 1941–1943 left it heavily damaged; after the war it was decided (along with its neighbours — the Moskovsky and Nikolaevsky Rows) not to rebuild. Today nothing remains of it except pre-revolutionary photographs and the memory of the first public museum in Ukraine, which once occupied its second floor.
