A centralized water supply system appeared in Nizhny Novgorod in the mid-nineteenth century. At that time, on Blagoveschenskaya Square — now Minin Square — the jets of the city's first fountain were ceremonially set in motion.
In April 2009, the renovated fountain at the same location was reopened, coinciding with a celebration sponsored by "Vodokanal" in honor of the heroism of those who established the Nizhny Novgorod water supply system.
Background
Wealthier residents, who had servants or horse-drawn carts, sent for water from springs that seeped out along the slopes of the Oka and Volga embankments. V. V. Perov painted his famous "Troika" in Moscow, but the same scene — ragged, freezing boys dragging a sledge with a water barrel — could surely have been seen on an early frosty morning on the Pochainsk, Georgievsk, and Pokhvalinsk descents as well.
Most people drew water from the Black Pond, Pokrovsky, and Zvezdinsky ponds and from the streams of the Pochaina, The Kovalikha River, Gremyachaya, and Bezymyannaya. In winter water was plentiful, but in summer the ponds and streams grew shallow, the water became polluted by cesspits and refuse, and not infrequently turned into a foul-smelling slurry. The shortage of water was a misfortune shared by all the Volga towns.
The Nizhny Novgorod Provincial Gazette of January 5, 1846, carried an article titled "Supplying Nizhny Novgorod with Water." It gives a clear picture of how serious the water situation in Nizhny had become.
All the inhabitants of Nizhny Novgorod in general, and especially those who live in the upper part of the city, are extremely hard-pressed to obtain water from the Volga and the Oka. A steep, almost cliff-like hill, forty-three fathoms high, forms the base of the upper city. What effort, what expense it costs to deliver river water to dwellings in such an unfavorable locality!
Those who, lacking sufficient means, have no horses and are forced either to send their people or to go themselves with buckets to the Volga River, feel this disadvantage most keenly. And the number of such people in all cities is incomparably greater than the number of the well-to-do. All the petty townspeople of Nizhny Novgorod, nine-tenths of the clerical estate, belong to this category. It is strange that no guild of water-carriers has yet appeared, as one did in Kazan, where delivering water from Lake Kaban is, moreover, far less difficult than delivering Volga water to the upper part of N. Novgorod. In Kazan one pays two kopecks in assignats per bucket; taking into account the difference in terrain between Kazan and Nizhny, one must put the price of a bucket of river water in Nizhny at five kopecks in assignats. That is indeed what the occasional water-carriers who appeared there charged.
The upper part of our city requires at least 20,000 buckets daily; this amounts to a value of 1,000 rubles in assignats per year. An almost unbelievably enormous sum, yet true nonetheless and based on sound calculation.
And fires — how often we witness that, despite every humanly possible effort by the police, a fire spreads for want of water. Leafing through the chronicles of Nizhny Novgorod, we note that since the mid-fourteenth century it has been subjected some twenty times to terrible calamities by fire; not infrequently an entire half of the city burned down, sometimes more — and the chief cause has always been the lack of water.— [[Newspaper "Nizhny Novgorod Provincial Gazette," January 5, 1846]
Attempts to solve the problem of supplying Nizhny Novgorod residents with water were made repeatedly. The name of the Nizhny Novgorod inventor Ivan Kulibin is known to all. For nearly half a century he struggled with the creation of a mechanism akin to a perpetual-motion machine.
The principal aim of these efforts was to devise an affordable method of raising Volga water to the necessary height. Plans for a water supply were drawn up later as well; among them were some utterly unrealizable schemes and some entirely practical ones. In any case, however, substantial sums were required — sums that were, as a rule, nowhere to be found in the city treasury. The resolution of the question was continually postponed, and the city stood on two great rivers yet without a reliable supply of drinking water.
The water supply question also influenced the city's development pattern, the role of its individual districts in subsequent growth, and what we now call the specialization of urban neighborhoods. In 1816 the question of relocating the Makaryev Fair to Nizhny Novgorod was under consideration. Chancellor Count Rumyantsev was handling the matter. Among the first projects submitted for his review was one that proposed Panskie Bugry — a vast, vacant field between the Voznesenskiy Pecherskiy Muzhskoy Monastery and the village of Vysokovo, that is, roughly from the present-day Semashko Hospital — as the site. But the question of water supply arose. Count Rumyantsev proposed arranging to lift water to the high bank using draught power. In addition to the costs of constructing the fair buildings and laying out descents to the Volga River, this would have amounted to several million rubles. The project was rejected.
Around 1835 a society was formed to carry out a project by an obscure mechanic for lifting water from the Oka River or the Volga to the heights and constructing storage reservoirs.
However, it fell apart, and the project was most likely lost.
Evidently, what was needed was not only money but also a man possessing authority and enjoying public trust. That man proved to be the newly arrived Governor-General, Prince M. A. Urusov, who came to Nizhny Novgorod in 1844.
Well aware of the slowness of the bureaucratic machine, Urusov applied for official permission to build the water supply system and at the same time began preparations for it, reviewing practical proposals.
One of the most interesting was a proposal from a Nizhny Novgorod merchant named Blumberg, who believed that with the aid of a steam engine Volga water could be raised to the Georgievskaya Tower. But since that tower stands on a hillside and might begin to collapse under the water pressure, he proposed creating the reservoir in the Dmitrievskaya Tower, taking as his model the installation in Moscow at the Sukharevskaya Tower. To cover the expenses, he proposed forming a joint-stock company.
The commercial aspect of the proposal ultimately caused the project to be rejected.
Construction
May 10, 1846, may be considered the starting point in the history of the construction of the Nizhny Novgorod water supply system.
That date appears on directive dispatch No. 7360 from the Chief Administrator of Roads and Public Buildings, informing the provincial construction commission that the district roads superintendent, Major-General Germes, together with Engineer-Lieutenant Colonel Shembel and Baron Delvig, had been charged: first, to investigate and determine how the upper part of the city might be supplied with water; second, on the basis of those investigations, to draw up a project and an estimate of costs; and third, to submit all of this first for the opinion of the Nizhny Novgorod military governor and then, together with his views, to the Chief Administrator.
The author of the water supply project was Engineer-Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Ivanovich Delvig. He was born in 1813. At fifteen he became a student at the St. Petersburg Military Construction School, which was reorganized in 1830 into the Institute of Roads and Communications. When he first arrived in N. Novgorod in 1837, he was only twenty-four, yet he was already no novice in construction: behind him lay experience surveying the environs of Saint Petersburg; he had also developed the design for the Moscow–Brest-Litovsk highway and carried out many other responsible commissions. Six years later he led the laying of the Moscow Highway from the borders of Vladimir Governorate to the Makaryev Yarmarka.
A demanding and honest man, he was strict with subordinates caught in negligence and especially in embezzlement of public funds. In their place he recruited young engineers of unblemished reputation. In 1844, after persistent persuasion by Prince Urusov, A. I. Delvig agreed to be transferred to the provincial board as head of construction works.
His principal task was to design and build the water supply system, but in addition he had a great many other duties: he was developing a new general plan for Nizhny Novgorod, since the old one corresponded to the existing built environment only in the section immediately adjacent to the Kremlin. The new plan had to allow for the city's growth while preserving as much of the existing fabric as possible. The plan was urgently needed for the design of the water supply system as well.
Another persistent headache for the entire engineering and construction corps of Nizhny Novgorod was slope stabilization work. Landslides and collapses had always been the most frequent natural hazards in the city. In 1845 they acquired, for some reason, a mass character. The section where construction of the first water supply system was to begin fell within the affected zone. A commission was therefore established and charged with studying the causes of the increased landslides and collapses and developing a set of measures to reduce the damage from them. A. I. Delvig became chairman of this commission.
Under his direction, too, the fair buildings were rebuilt, the Moscow Highway below N. Novgorod was paved with cobblestones, and the buildings of the women's Mariinsky Institute complex were erected — a site near the old Sennaya Square was chosen for them (the present territory of the polytechnic university). One can imagine how intense was the life of this man! Yet his greatest contribution to N. Novgorod remains the design and construction of the water supply system. The project was reviewed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and submitted for the highest approval: Emperor Nicholas I himself examined it.
All the construction work for the water supply system was awarded by tender to Nizhny Novgorod merchant V. Michurin for 20,100 silver rubles.
Design
The water supply systems built by that time in Russian cities were gravity-fed. For well-known reasons, such a design was unsuitable for N. Novgorod. The problem of equipping a pumping station had to be solved.
Foreign countries already had experience building such equipment, but it was so expensive that the whole undertaking of constructing a water supply system would have become impractical. Russian mechanical factories did not manufacture such equipment, and placing an order turned out to be extremely difficult. It took all the influence and all the powers of persuasion — the ability to push others toward risk — that Prince M. A. Urusov possessed to get the manager of the Vyksa factories to take on the supply and on-site installation of all the components of the water supply system.
When all obstacles had been overcome, Nizhny Novgorod residents set about building the waterworks. On July 1, 1846, the foundation stone was laid for the water-pumping station building and for a fountain on Blagoveschenskaya Square. Work began. As early as November 1846, cast-iron pipes and all the metal fittings had been delivered from the Vyksa plant.
The intense work and repeated trips to Vyksa — where the Shepelyev plant was fulfilling the order for steam engines and the cast-iron fountain basin — took a toll on A. I. Delvig's health. He left for treatment abroad and returned in the autumn, just before construction was completed.
Structure
What was Nizhny Novgorod's first waterworks actually like? Along the Volga escarpment, from the Kremlin to the Red Barracks, twelve springs were brought to the surface. Water was collected through drilled wooden pipes into a reservoir at the pumping station, which was built at the junction of the Kazansky and Georgievsky descents. Near that spot, in the shade of trees, a drainage adit now emerges — familiar to everyone who comes to rest on the Volga beach. Its cold, clear water — unfortunately not as pure as in Delvig's day — beckons in the summer heat. Yet few people know that the very first pumping station of Nizhny Novgorod stood close by.
The station building was designed to house two steam engines and two boilers. The station also had workshops, storehouses, a firewood yard, and residential quarters for the workers.
Two Watt-type beam steam engines provided a supply of 5,000 buckets of water per day through four cast-iron pressure pipes running from the station, through Aleksandrovsky Garden and straight down the Otkos to Martynov Hospital. The pipes were then routed through the hospital's kitchen garden to the intersection of Zhukovskaya Street (now Minin Street) and Martynovskaya Street (now Semashko Street), where the first water-distribution reservoir was installed. From there the water main continued along Zhukovskaya Street to Blagoveschenskaya Square (now Minin and Pozharsky Square), where a cast-iron fountain — the principal water-distribution point — was erected.
From there, water was conveyed through a drilled wooden pipe to the Kremlin and the governor's palace. This was the only individual household connection at that time.
Opening
The day of the waterworks' trial run arrived. Picture a raw autumn morning, with dawn barely breaking. On Blagoveschenskaya Square stood a small group of people, among them the imposing figure of the governor, with A. I. Delvig at his side. Word had already come that Anton Trofimovich Kopyev, chief mechanic of the Shepelyev plants and the man in charge of installing the pumping machines, had set one of them in motion. The minutes dragged by, and nervous trembling ran through the crowd of onlookers. How their anxiety gave way to jubilation when the water, with its first faint surge, splashed into the fountain basin!
Over the following two years work continued to extend the water-main network. The water main along Zhukovskaya Street was extended to the Mariinsky Institute and connected to the building. From Blagoveschenskaya Square, pipes were laid along Alekseevskaya and Dvoryanskaya (Oktyabrskaya) Streets to Lykova Dam, where another water-distribution reservoir was installed. The wooden pipes to the governor's palace were replaced with cast-iron ones, and the wooden pipes were relocated to the first water-distribution reservoir, with a connection made to the provincial hospital.
A. I. Delvig threw himself into the expansion of the waterworks with all the passion of his energetic nature, and his closest colleagues worked with equal dedication. Delvig's right hand, his chief adviser and executor, was A. T. Kopyev, chief mechanic of the Vyksa plants. All orders for the waterworks were manufactured in Vyksa according to his drawings and estimates; he personally supervised the installation of equipment, and everything was done with consummate skill — simply, elegantly, and with mathematical precision. Out of his own pocket he donated a cast-iron floor weighing 69 puds for the station, laid on site free of charge as well.
Immediately after construction was completed, by order of Urusov a waterworks management body was established. Oversight was entrusted to the chief builder, A. I. Delvig. The waterworks superintendent — a candidate of the military department named Kindyakov — was required to appear before the governor every day and report on the condition and operation of the waterworks. This continued for seven years, for as long as Urusov governed the province. Kindyakov was assigned two machinists from the Vyksa plants, three stokers, four laborers, and two watchmen as assistants. In winter, convicts were sent at a modest wage to chip ice. The governor requisitioned a military detachment for the maintenance of the waterworks.
The waterworks did not come cheap: for the first eight years expenses ran to 6,600 rubles annually, of which only a small portion went to the military detachment and the greater part to firewood. Around 4,500 cubic meters of firewood were burned.
In 1848 A. I. Delvig left Nizhny Novgorod, having been seconded to the Chief Administration of Transport. From 1853 to 1858 he directed the second reconstruction of the Mytishchi waterworks. Among his listed works are several that reflect the experience gained during the construction of the Nizhny Novgorod waterworks. In 1857 he published Russia's first "Manual for the Construction of Waterworks."
The subsequent fate of the first water-pumping station
With the departure of A. I. Delvig, and seven years later of Prince Urusov, attention to the waterworks waned, and the facilities began to fall into disrepair.
In 1859 Engineer-Colonel Stremoukhov reported to the building commission on the deplorable condition of the station and its machinery, as a result of which the city was left without water for days at a time.
The city architect Nebolsin established that of the 18 co-opted springs, only three were in fact functioning properly. The water entering the station reservoir was sometimes insufficient even to feed the boilers, and as a result both machines were shut down. They required a complete overhaul. This work consumed the entire summer of 1859, and at the end of August the waterworks was put back into operation.
The military detachment manning the pumping station was disbanded in 1860. Drunkenness and insubordination had reached an extreme. The savings on their wages turned into heavy losses for the city. The soldiers were replaced by civilian hired staff.
A plan of measures to remedy the deficiencies in the waterworks' operation was drawn up in the city. The impetus for Nizhny Novgorod residents was a directive from the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the creation of fire brigades from among the city's residents. A temporary committee chaired by City Head Burmistrov immediately raised the question of water supply.
However, there was no money to implement the measures, and only in 1872 did a session of the city duma pass a resolution to construct new wooden water basins holding 5,000 buckets each on Kovalikhinsky Square and the old Sennaya Square Square, with cast-iron pipes to be laid to them, and to install a reserve reservoir holding 10,000 buckets near the hospital booth. The work was carried out, and this constituted the final stage in the development of Nizhny Novgorod's first waterworks.
(from the book by V. M. Smirnova and E. G. Filatov "Water and the City")