Until the beginning of the 19th century, the official city boundary was the Fontanka River. At that time, there was also a city rampart that ran almost entirely along the future route of the Obvodny Canal. South of the rampart, on the right side of the road, was the "cattle yard," where livestock were driven for sale. It was a wooden structure and a large enclosure. It was a large dusty (or muddy, depending on the weather) field,

fenced with a low fence, rows of stakes for tying up cattle, wooden sheds, and a small slaughterhouse. Beyond that was a suburb, with forests and meadows stretching out. The cattle were driven along Skotoprigonnaya Road and usually allowed to graze on nearby meadows. The animals lost a lot of weight on the road, so it was necessary to at least partially restore their marketable appearance.

There is a legend that while traveling along Tsarskoye Selo Road, Emperor Alexander I noticed the unsightly appearance of the "cattle yard," was unpleasantly surprised, and ordered it to be tidied up. This was carried out between 1821 and 1825 by the architect I. I. Charlemagne. On the site of the old "cattle yard," which occupied an area roughly the size of a square verst and was enclosed by a solid fence, a new building for the Cattle Yard was constructed. The main building faced Tsarskoye Selo Prospect (as this part of Moskovsky Prospect was then called), housing the office, exchange hall, a tea room for merchants, and apartments for some employees. The building was crowned with a pediment and decorated at the second-floor level with a stucco panel depicting a cornucopia and Mercury's caduceus—symbols of wealth and trade. The lower part of the building was rusticated and designed as a plinth. The center was pierced by three entrance arches, flanked on pedestals made of red granite by bronze statues of bulls created in 1827 by sculptor V. I. Demut-Malinovsky.

The bulls were different. One looked at passersby, and popular rumor nicknamed it "Vzorushka" (the Watcher). The other saw something interesting slightly to the side—this one was called "Nevzorushka" (the Unwatcher).

The side wings, connected by a wall to the central building, were intended for housing cattle and storing hay. Their architectural treatment was consistent with the rest of the structure. At that time, cattle were sold here. The slaughterhouse was arranged later, at the end of the 19th century. In the early 1930s, the former cattle yard and slaughterhouse were moved outside the city limits. In the depths of the site, according to the project of architects V. F. Tvelkmeier, A. M. Sokolov, and I. I. Fomin, the Dairy Plant building was erected between 1932 and 1934. The bulls also left their pedestals—they were relocated to the entrance of the new Leningrad Meat Processing Plant on Moskovskoye Highway.

What Sergey Anatolyevich Nosov writes about the legend connected with these bulls in his book "The Secret Life of St. Petersburg Monuments."

"Now we cannot fail to mention the almost mystical story connected with these bulls. It is known, but we will add something to it. It was revealed to the general public by the St. Petersburg local historian V. V. Nesterov in the famous book 'Lions Guard the City' (1971). After N. A. Sindalovsky embellished its retelling with the motif of a prophetic dream, this story became very popular and even appeared in Moscow newspapers. It concerns the operation to save the bronze bulls at the beginning of the war. The bronze bull figures were moved away from the front line to another part of the city—not just anywhere, but to the territory of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, where, by coincidence, the ashes of Demut-Malinovsky himself rested in the Tikhvin Cemetery. The bulls, as if, came to the grave of their creator. The city folklore collector N. A. Sindalovsky tells a legend about a strange dream supposedly once dreamed by Demut-Malinovsky: the bronze bulls, recently created by him, came to visit Demut-Malinovsky at home. What this meant, the dreamer could not decipher. But we know. Thanks to Sindalovsky, the story of the mystical meeting at the cemetery is now invariably told together with the sculptor’s dream. I do not know in which circles the legend of Demut-Malinovsky’s dream circulated, but even without this dream, the coincidence is more than expressive. There is one overlooked nuance here.

The fact is that Demut-Malinovsky, who died in 1846, was buried not in the Tikhvin Cemetery but in a completely different cemetery—the Smolensky. Five years later, his wife Elizaveta Feodosyevna was buried there as well—destined to lie together with her father, the sculptor F. F. Shchedrin, under a single granite tomb monument, a sacrificial altar. A similar monument was on the grave of S. F. Shchedrin, a landscape painter and her uncle. In the 1930s, two cemeteries on the territory of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, Lazarevskoye and Tikhvinskoye, gained the status of memorials. Lazarevskoye became a museum—the 18th-century Necropolis. Since the Shchedrin brothers, as artists, belonged to that century, they were reburied among other celebrities in Lazarevskoye, with both monuments moved there. The daughter was reburied with her father. And a few years later, Vasily Ivanovich Demut-Malinovsky himself—undoubtedly due to his merits—was reburied in the neighboring Tikhvin Cemetery, then called the 'Necropolis of Masters of Arts and Contemporaries of A. S. Pushkin.' Vasily Ivanovich lay in his first grave at Smolensky Cemetery for nearly a century. And the bulls stood in one place for many years. It turns out that Demut-Malinovsky’s ashes were disturbed precisely when his bulls were sent to the edge of the city to the 'meat giant.'

It also turns out that husband and wife were separated and now rest in different cemeteries, although neighboring ones, separated by two stone walls.

The monument on Vasily Ivanovich’s grave appeared only before the war. And at the beginning of the war, this story happened with the bulls coming to him.

So not only did the bulls come to their creator, but the creator himself made an inexplicable journey to meet them."

In the 2020s, the bulls became the subject of a court case. LLC "Samson" claimed that after the privatization of the state enterprise in 1992, the statues also passed to it. The Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region rejected LLC "Samson’s" claim against Rosimushchestvo and the Interregional Territorial Administration to recognize ownership rights to the bull figures. The figures belong to the city and, since spring 2021, have been under the operational management of the State Museum of Urban Sculpture of St. Petersburg.

The architectural bureau "Studio 44" designed a residential complex at the corner of Moskovsky Prospect and the Obvodny Canal embankment (the territory of the former Cattle Yard), which is being built by the Legenda group of companies. After many years near the Leningrad Meat Processing Plant and a recent restoration, in 2023 the decision was made:

to return the bulls to their historic place—by the building on Obvodny.

Sources:

Cattle Yard, 1914. https://pastvu.com/p/251817

https://dzen.ru/a/Xb2R-gpFGACxqVqP

https://kirill-kravchenko.narod.ru/werksdenkmal/gebiet_moskva/07/moskva_07.htm

https://linalina20.livejournal.com/1576722.html

https://pub.wikireading.ru/88025

"The Secret Life of St. Petersburg Monuments" by Sergey Anatolyevich Nosov