Just above Rozhdestvenskaya Street, at its intersection with Zelensky Descent, next to the newly rebuilt Kazan Church, Ilyinsky Descent began. It gradually merged into Ilyinskaya Street at the point where the Church of Elijah the Prophet stands.
At the end of the 19th century the descent was merged with the street, which thereafter acquired a winding, terrain-following character and a greater number of buildings. No. 2 on the present-day Ilyinskaya Street belonged to Ivan Savelyevich Nesterov, a peasant building contractor and seller of baked bread. Having moved to Nizhny Novgorod, he registered as a local meshchanin (townsman), and later found himself among the builders of the original complex of buildings of the Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka.
On 1 June 1822, on the slope of Ilyinskaya Hill, at the descent toward the Lower Posad trading yard, Ivan Nesterov purchased a plot of land and, to a design by the architect I. E. Yefimov (approved on 26 August 1823), constructed a three-storey stone tenement house with five windows on the main façade. The first floor was articulated with horizontal rustication grooves, the windows of the second floor were given relief surrounds at the top, and the third floor received semicircular arched tops and sets of balusters in the recessed panels beneath the windows. The house was valued at the then enormous sum of 10,000 rubles.
On 9 May 1832, I. E. Yefimov designed for Ivan Nesterov a wing on the adjacent slope — two storeys above vaulted cellars, with a similar architectural and artistic treatment of the façade — along with a carriage gateway into the yard, based on a standard pattern design. The wing was completed in the summer of the same year. Of the entire estate, only the main house has survived to the present day.
No. 6 on Ilyinskaya Street was the property of the merchant Pavel Vasilyevich Vyakhirev. His grandfather, A. I. Vyakhirev of Balakhna, registered himself together with his wife and six sons as third-guild Nizhny Novgorod merchants in 1839. At first he acquired a stone house in Blagoveshchenskaya Sloboda, became a major grain trader, and supplied the expanding residential construction then underway in the city. His grandson, Pavel Vasilyevich, was already a second-guild merchant. He decided to move his permanent residence closer to the Nizhneposadsky Torg (Lower Posad Market) and to build a stone house with outbuildings at the beginning of Ilyinskaya Street. Vyakhirev commissioned the design of the two-storey house — with cellars and a mezzanine, making it practically four storeys — from the municipal architect N. I. Uzhumedsky-Gritsevich. The plans, elevations, and sections were approved by the Nizhny Novgorod Building Commission on 16 August 1860, and construction began at the same time. On the design drawings the architect added a note: "By mutual agreement with the owner, I wish to take upon myself supervision of the works during the construction of this house." The first floor was given squared rustication with keystones above the window openings, and the second floor received finely drawn window surrounds. The building, erected by a professional, has been well preserved and remains an interesting example of construction on the city's "awkward" sites — the hillside slopes of Ilyinskaya Hill with a marked change in level across the building plot — and a notably successful solution to the objective difficulties this presented.
No. 7 was once the clergy house of Ilyinskaya Church. In 1867 it was decided to erect a two-storey stone house along the building line of Ilyinskaya Street, beside the church apse. The design was commissioned from architect N. B. Feldt. Construction began in 1868. The house was built on a hillside and on the boundary of the clergy's fortress land, which determined its architectural solution. Despite the levelling of the plot, the building ended up with unequal heights at the two ends of its main façade and a blank fire-wall on the eastern side, which created an impression of compositional and architectural incompleteness. The house, tripartite in plan with two rooms on either side of a narrow entrance hall, has much in common with the layout of a traditional Old Russian izba (traditional wooden house). The main façade has five windows; the first floor is rusticated. The windows of the second floor have semicircular arched tops and pilaster strips in the piers between them, both typical of Nizhny Novgorod architecture of the period. In 1869 the house was finished in full accordance with the approved façade design, under the supervision of its author. The building has survived to the present day in virtually its original state.