New Sergiivskyy Row
An expansion of the Sergiivskyy market.
The Novo-Sergiivskyy Row was an extension of the older Sergiivskyy market, built in the 1870s and 1880s as merchant traffic surged through Kharkiv. The railways and the new sugar refineries of Sloboda Ukraine had poured capital into the city and the old row was running out of stalls; the new block went up on the adjoining plot, repeating its predecessor's logic: open arcades on the ground floor for the shops, residential and office space above. Unlike its elder sibling, the façade was resolved in modest late-classical forms — pilasters instead of half-columns, a simpler cornice.
The Novo-Sergiivskyy specialised in haberdashery, leather goods, footwear, umbrellas, walking sticks and the small fashionable items the era called galantereya. A Singer sewing-machine workshop operated here — one of the first in Kharkiv; toy shops dressed their windows for St. Nicholas and Christmas. Mercantile life around the two rows merged into a single organism: by the 1900s more than 120 shops lined the square, and in the weeks before the holidays tram route № 3 ran right up to the Pokrovskyy Monastery.
The Soviets nationalised the row in 1919 and gradually turned it over to labour collectives and warehouses. In the early 1930s it was demolished alongside the Sergiivskyy Row — part of a single campaign to cleanse the centre of its 'bourgeois past'. The cleared lot opened a sightline from Sumska to the Pokrovskyy Monastery, but it left a gap in the plan of the centre that post-war Soviet housing filled with anonymous four-storey blocks. Today nothing remains of the row but its shadows on old photographs of Sergiivska Square.
