Minin Street, formerly Zhukovskaya — one of the central streets of Nizhny Novgorod. It was planned as a straight road from the Kremlin to the Pecherskaya Zastava (Pechersk Gate) under the 1770 plan, but was only laid out by surveyor N. I. Tikhmenev by 1787. The street was named in the 17th century after the wealthy townspeople Dmitry and Gavrila Zhukov. Until the early 19th century, construction along it was confined mainly within the bounds of the Maly Ostrog (Small Stockade), whose earthen ramparts cut across the street. At the center of the street, a square was planned with the corners of the city blocks chamfered inward. However, during the replanning of the city in 1823–1824, A. A. Betancourt and V. I. Geste abandoned this idea and instead laid out a rectangular Sennaya Square (now the site of the institute of foreign languages) between Zhukovskaya Street and Bolshaya Pecherskaya Street.
At around the same time, an extensive plot of land on Zhukovskaya Street was purchased from Colonel S. M. Martynov, on which the Board of Public Welfare erected the buildings of the provincial hospital and, later, a stone Church of All Who Sorrow with Joy. During the city's reconstruction in 1834–1839, another rectangular square was designed between Verkhne-Volzhskaya Embankment and Zhukovskaya Street, near St. George's Church, for the construction of a public theatre.
That project was eventually abandoned. In the 1840s, however, closer to the Pecherskaya Zastava, a complex of buildings for the Mariinsky Women's Institute with a cour d'honneur was designed and completed by 1858. The construction of the Spassky Cathedral on Sennaya Square (after which the square was renamed Spasskaya, and the hay market relocated to the Pecherskaya Zastava) and of a fire station with a watchtower significantly transformed the architectural character of what had once been an outlying part of the city.
Today Minin Street is home to a number of the city's universities (NGLU, NSTU, VVAGS, and buildings of both Lobachevsky University and the Nizhny Novgorod State Medical Academy), so strolling along it one is likely to encounter plenty of students hurrying to their classes. Traffic is frequently congested here, as the street forms part of the route between the administrative and business center and the residential district.