Passage (department store)

The Passage, from the French word passage, is an élite department store on Nevsky Avenue in Saint Petersburg, Russia, which was founded in 1848. The Passage premises have long had associations with the entertainment industry and houses the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre.

The site where the Passage sprawls had been devoted to trade since the city's foundation in the early 18th century. It had been occupied by various shops and warehouses (Little Gostiny Dvor, Schukin Dvor, Apraksin Dvor) until 1846, when Count Essen-Stenbock-Fermor acquired the grounds to build an elite shopping mall for the highest echelons of the Russian nobility and bourgeoisie.

The name came from a vast gallery between Nevsky Avenue and Italianskaya Street which provided the main passage through the mall. The gallery was covered over by an arching glass and steel roof, thus giving it a claim to being one of the world's first shopping malls, along with Passage du Caire in Paris (1798) Burlington Arcade in London, Galerie Vivienne in Paris (1823) and Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert in Brussels.

The three-storey building of the Passage opened its doors to consumers on May 9, 1848. It was one of the first structures in Russia to employ gas for lighting. Another innovation was an underground floor, where an electric station would be installed in 1900. Although the store specialized in jewellery, expensive clothes and other luxury goods, crowds of common people flocked to see the most fashionable shop of the Russian Empire. A fee of 50 kopecks had to be introduced in order to limit admissions.

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Wikipedia