Saint Petersburg rarely loses a building outright. Far more often it loses details: the shape of a window, a rooftop structure, a row of chimneys, a wing in a courtyard. Here are six addresses where that is happening right now, based on daily reporting by Kanoner, a local paper that tracks construction and reconstruction across the city, and on records of KGIOP, the city's heritage protection committee. All of them can be seen from the street, and several will look different within months.
Vasilyevsky Island: two houses a few blocks apart
The Sysoev mansion, 9th Line 60. Built in 1845 to a design by Alexei Andreyev; five window bays on the left of today's building are the original house. The right-hand part was added in 1900 as a Roman Catholic orphanage for children. In 2014 a bank converted the whole thing into offices: the attic became a mansard, and two of the six ground-floor windows were altered then. In 2024 a new owner obtained permission to rebuild it as a restaurant, and by August 2026, Kanoner reports, the remaining historic ground-floor windows had been merged into new openings. Legally this is reconstruction, not demolition. In practice the rhythm of the ground-floor facade is gone.
The house at 8th Line 5/20. A two-storey building from the late eighteenth century, with a wing running through to Dneprovsky Lane. The Parland baths operated here in the mid-nineteenth century; the present appearance dates from the 1890s. In the late 2000s the owner planned to demolish it for a seven-storey office block and managed to remove part of the courtyard wing in 2007–2009. Then a law banning the demolition of pre-revolutionary buildings came into force and the project had to be redrawn. The house stood derelict for nearly twenty years. Now, according to KGIOP, the owner has declared a major repair with "local changes to the facades." For once, the building survives.
The city centre: what disappears from the roofs
The Artillery Department house, Chernyshevsky Avenue 14/59. This corner building at Tchaikovsky Street was built in 1870 to a design by Alexander Gemilian, two storeys on the corner and three along Tchaikovsky. It stood partly abandoned for years. Reconstruction was approved in 2024 and is now complete: a rooftop structure was removed, almost all the chimneys were taken down, and the attic became a mansard floor. Chimney stacks are part of the texture of Petersburg roofs that you only notice once they are gone.
Unfinished buildings the city cannot demolish
On the corner of Lesnoy Avenue and Kantemirovskaya Street stands a concrete shell. A pre-revolutionary corner house stood here until the late 1980s and was demolished. In 2013 the site was approved for a two-storey retail and office building; the frame went up by 2019 and work stopped. The city cancelled the lease and demanded demolition, the developer went bankrupt in 2022, and the court refused to order the shell removed. A deputy head of the city property committee told Kanoner in September 2026 that appeals have not helped so far.
Two comparable shells did come down in August 2026, on Entuziastov Avenue and Marshala Kazakova Street, after courts declared them unauthorised construction. On Dobrushskaya Street the opposite happened: a single-storey building from 1966 gained an unapproved second floor, the city asked the court to restore its former appearance, and the court declined to order demolition.
Rebuilt in 2028
The first stretch of Dekabristov Lane on Vasilyevsky Island runs between the Smolenskoye Lutheran and Armenian cemeteries. It has no pavement, and since 2022 a crash barrier protecting new lamp posts has taken up part of the roadway, leaving pedestrians a narrow gap along the cemetery wall. A deputy head of the city improvement committee told Kanoner the stretch fails technical standards and will be rebuilt in 2028.
