Rozhdestvenskaya Street (known in Soviet times as Kooperativnaya, then Mayakovsky Street; colloquially: Mayakovka) — the city's second most important street after Pokrovka, and the hub of restaurants, bars, and nightlife in Nizhny Novgorod, together with the adjacent Markin Square and the Nizhne-Volzhskaya Embankment. In this Nizhny Novgorod "red-light district" of seedy establishments, one can readily find nightclubs — including gay clubs — strip bars, outlets selling smoking blends, and round-the-clock restaurants. Prostitutes and soft drugs are easy to come by here, despite a Militia (police)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) station nearby.
At the same time, this is one of the city's oldest streets, preserving its merchant character and the "mercantile spirit" of Nizhny's former commercial and business center. It is no accident that the district along the banks of the Oka and the Volga River was known as the Lower Bazaar. Banks, shipping offices, shops, trading arcades, restaurants, and mansions — and right alongside, beneath the Ivanovo Tower of the Kremlin, the famous Millioshka" described in the stories of Maxim Gorky — a quarter of the destitute, the city's underworld.
Eras and styles have blended together in Nizhny's former commercial and financial center. The cosmopolitan tastes brought by the 1896 exhibition lavished merchant mansions with bay windows and domes, stirring envy among neighbors and admiration among visiting guests.
The street also retains sites connected with Gorky's biography. At No. 24 (the former Blinov Arcade), on November 6, 1901, a farewell gathering was held for the writer, who was being expelled from his home city by the tsarist government. The following day, young people who had come to see their beloved writer off to the railway station marched along this street. Near Rozhdestvenskaya, on what is now Kozhevennaya Street (No. 11), a tea room for down-and-outs was organized at Gorky's initiative. The three-story brick building standing apart in the Skoba area is a former doss house, visited by M. Gorky, V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, and M. P. Dmitriev in preparation for the staging of the play "The Lower Depths."