"Plan of the provincial city of Nizhny Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod Governorate" — a hand-colored manuscript plan of the city from the mid-19th century. The survey was carried out in the 1840s, and the plan was approved in the early 1850s. It shows the entire city built-up area block by block, colored by building type, along with the surrounding lands: Nizhny Novgorod Fair and the Kunavino sloboda, which later became part of the city as Kanavino.
What the Plan Shows
The main field of the sheet is occupied by the city within its mid-19th-century boundaries: the Kremlin with its interior buildings, the Upper Part from the Kremlin walls, slopes and ravines, and descents to the rivers. The built-up area is colored by block: different colors mark Wooden Buildings of Nizhny Novgorod, government buildings, churches, gardens, and vegetable plots. At the bottom of the sheet is an "Explanation of Symbols" — a legend of conventional signs, by which the plan reads today just as it was read by officials of the provincial administration.
The rivers are labeled in old orthography — "RIVER VOLGA" and "RIVER OKA"; the plan also shows a backwater, sandbars, and a pontoon bridge. The scale bars are given in sazhens.
The Fair and Kunavino Sloboda
To the left of the city is marked the land of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair's Gostiny Dvor — a territory on the left bank that lived by its own order and was built up for the trading season. A separate inset in the right part of the sheet gives the "Plan of the Kunavino sloboda, belonging to the provincial city of Nizhny Novgorod": a regular grid of blocks of the future Kanavino, which at that time was still a suburban sloboda.
Significance of the Document
The plan records the city before the major rebuilding of the second half of the 19th century and before the industrial growth of the trans-river part. It is used to reconstruct streets and lanes that have since disappeared, the former boundaries of blocks, and the location of demolished churches and government buildings. For local-history work it is a primary source: it shows not a retelling, but how the city was laid out and recorded by its contemporaries.The plan itself, as a mid-19th-century document, is in the public domain.