Kazansky Descent (formerly Pechersky) — runs down from Sennaya Square, the Tramplin ski jump to Krasnaya Sloboda and the beach on the Rowing Canal.
Built by order of Nicholas I, Kazansky Descent provided a direct link between the southeastern part of the city and the Volga riverbank. Beyond Sennaya Square, the city's outskirts gave way to rural territory at that time, so Kazansky Descent, as the Russian emperor defined its purpose, proved to be a true commercial road not only to the Nizhny Posad but also to the annual Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka. The descent was called Kazansky because it led onto the Kazan highway, though Khramtsovsky referred to it as Pechersky — after its proximity to the Pechersky Monastery.
On the bank of the Volga River, at the foot of Kazansky Descent, the factory buildings of one of 19th-century Nizhny Novgorod's largest enterprises — the plant of I. S. Kolchin — have survived to this day. In 1849 the Sormovo shipbuilding plant was founded, creating an annual demand for large deliveries of steam engines and other specialized marine equipment. In April 1857, several entrepreneurs proposed establishing the new kind of mechanical plant that Nizhny Novgorod then lacked: Ivan Savelyevich Kolchin, a Moscow merchant of the second guild; Stepan Abramovich Nenyukov, a Krasnoslobodsk merchant of the first guild; Vasily Klimentovich Michurin, a Nizhny Novgorod industrialist; and others. They petitioned the city duma to allocate a plot on the Volga bank at the point where Kazansky Descent met the embankment.
After the customary three rounds of open bidding, Kolchin and Nenyukov each received sizeable, adjacent plots of land. Kolchin immediately began constructing factory buildings with a steamboat pier, following a design by architect N. I. Uzhumedsky-Gritsevich. In 1859, to expand the factory grounds, he purchased an adjoining plot of land (25 linear fathoms), and in 1861, following a design by architect R. Ya. Kilevein, he began construction of a wooden administrative building set on a stone ground floor with cellars, its roof crowned by an open-sided gazebo with a wraparound gallery (resembling the povaloushi tower-chamber traditional in ancient Russian residential architecture).
The factory buildings, completed by 1863, have survived to the present day and are the oldest industrial structures of 19th-century Nizhny Novgorod. The plant was among the most intensively developing enterprises in the Nizhny Novgorod region. It was closely associated with the long years of inventive work by Vasily Ivanovich Kalashnikov. In 1885, after the plant passed into the ownership of Ustin Savvich Kurbatov, a first-guild merchant from Kazan, it employed 350 workers, and by 1903 the number had risen to 543. The owner's annual income at the beginning of the twentieth century exceeded half a million rubles.