The unique high-rise silhouette of Saint Petersburg began to take shape back in the times of Peter I, with the first tall landmarks being the bell tower of the Peter and Paul Cathedral and the spire of the Admiralty. At the beginning of the 20th century, when Art Nouveau prevailed, the silhouettes of Petersburg streets blossomed with numerous towers, but only one of them literally managed to outshine the Admiralty needle. This is the tower with a dome and spire of the brilliant trading house "Esders and Scheefhals" Au Pont Rouge. For more than a hundred years, this trading house has been known to Petersburgers as the "At the Red Bridge" store. Located at the corner of the Fontanka River embankment and Gorokhovaya Street, it attracts the attention of passersby with its exceptional architectural forms and exterior decoration, enticing Petersburg and visiting fashionistas with its rich display windows. It was the first multi-story department store in Russia (built in 1906-1907), popular among wealthy residents and guests of the city, as well as the Romanov family.

However, this place became one of the centers of European fashion in Russia already in the times of Empress Catherine, when the sewing workshop of the court tailor Christian Friedrich Poppe opened on the Moika River bank. As early as the second half of the 18th century, the Petersburg elite flocked here in search of a new fashionable dress. The first multi-story department store in Russia In 1904, the owner of the prosperous Belgian firm Stefan Esders purchased a four-story residential building at the corner of the Moika and Gorokhovaya to build a fashionable trading house in its place, the sixth among his European shopping centers in Brussels, Vienna, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Breslau. One of the main requirements for the building was to conform to the firm's traditions: with a corner multi-story volume, a tower, the main entrance on the chamfered corner, and a light hall. The corner location made the building more prominent. Thanks to its orientation to two streets, the interior space received more daylight, and the top floor included an apartment for the manager. The Petersburg architects Konstantin de Rochefort and Vladimir Lipsky received the commission for the design. This project became the greatest creative achievement in their careers. In May 1905, drawings and sketches were submitted to the city administration for approval. The project was based on a metal frame mounted on a ribbed reinforced concrete slab. This allowed for huge windows spanning the entire height of the building and a spacious atrium. In the summer of 1906, the first stone was laid here. The ceremony was organized by Karl Scheefhals, nephew of the firm’s head, who managed affairs locally. All iron structures weighing almost 1,150 tons were manufactured and installed within three months. The building was completed in 1906, and on March 3, 1907, the first multi-story universal store in Russia opened its doors on the site of the sewing workshop. Only the nobility dressed here, while everyone else dreamed of getting in. The "At the Red Bridge" department store became a true palace: luxurious, fashionable, and expensive. It had the richest assortment of goods in Petersburg and an unprecedentedly attentive European service. Among the store’s clients were, for example, the famous Petersburg dandy Vladimir Nabokov and the wife of the reigning Emperor, Alexandra Feodorovna. The department store offered hats, men's, women's, and children's clothing, photographic supplies and stationery, fashionable European magazines and patterns. Sewing ateliers for tailoring and fitting dresses also operated here. Alas, the golden age of trade at the Red Bridge lasted less than ten years. The history of the Au Pont Rouge ("At the Red Bridge") department store building in its modern form begins in 1905, when representatives of the board of the famous Belgian-Dutch trading firm "S. Esders and K. Scheefhals," a global supplier of ready-made women's and men's clothing, bought the plot and corner house at 73 Moika River Embankment and 15 Gorokhovaya Street.

That same year, Belgian-Austrian entrepreneur Stefan Esders and his partner and nephew Karl Scheefhals from the Netherlands submitted an application for permission to build a five-story building with an attic for a modern trading house.

Permission was granted, and in 1906-1907, near the Red Bridge, according to the design of Petersburg architects Vladimir Alexandrovich Lipsky and Konstantin Nikolaevich de Rochefort, an unusual building of the trading house "S. Esders and K. Scheefhals" was erected.

The basis of the Art Nouveau building was a massive metal frame weighing 70,000 poods (1,147 tons), an idea Rochefort borrowed from the recently opened Singer Company building on Nevsky Prospect, an original example of combining Parisian and New York styles.

However, the building on the Moika is somewhat more modest; all the lavish details are concentrated at the top. The lower part of the house somewhat resonates with modern architecture, with huge rectangular windows and rather narrow piers. On the fourth floor, window openings have semicircular tops; on the fifth, paired windows; and the attic floor is decorated with horseshoe-shaped windows. Above the fourth-floor windows are depicted water lilies, and garlands descend from medallions on the piers. The facade facing the Moika River ends with a low attic bearing the owners’ names. The original chamfered corner of the house creates the impression of a smooth transition from Gorokhovaya Street to the Moika River embankment. The corner of the house was originally crowned with a tall shako (military cap), which became the decoration of the "At the Red Bridge" Trading House. After completion, the authoritative acceptance commission noted that the commercial trading enterprise building on the corner plot No. 73/15 of the right bank of the Moika and Gorokhovaya Street fully met the modern requirements of a large shopping center. Its layout and convenient placement of trading and demonstration halls, storage, and office premises fully corresponded to the standards of the best European department stores of the early 20th century. Moreover, the building became the first multi-story store in Russia. For ten years, until 1917, the Trading House on the Moika was considered the most fashionable and wealthy trading enterprise, offering comfortable conditions and a wide range of goods for Petersburg’s affluent buyers. It was a chic, spacious, light-filled grand magasin selling literally everything from lace and gloves to mantles and hats. Among the store’s clients were members of the imperial family, including Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, wife of Nicholas II. After the October Revolution, the building, abandoned by its owners, stood empty for a year and a half until July 1919, when the Council of National Economy of the Northern District of Petrograd decided to transfer the building to the Central Sewing Factory. In 1922, this Leningrad enterprise was named after the Soviet commissar Volodarsky, who had been a tailor before the revolution.

At the start of the Great Patriotic War, the main production was evacuated to Perm, but the sewing workshops on the Moika embankment in the besieged city continued to fulfill orders for the front. The factory gradually grew into the Leningrad Volodarsky Production Sewing Association, one of the largest in the Soviet Union, but the building on the Moika gradually lost its former splendor. In the 1920s and 1930s, many historic buildings in Leningrad were demolished as they contradicted the Soviet plan of monumental propaganda, and almost all domes and towers that appeared in the panoramas of the main views of the Admiralty tower and the bell tower of the Peter and Paul Fortress were removed. Because of this, the building at the Red Bridge lost its upward-reaching caduceus staff and the openwork dome. A few decades later, the glass dome over the light well was dismantled due to extreme dilapidation and leaks. The building fell into final decline by the late 1990s when the sewing factory finally left these walls. Revival of the "At the Red Bridge" building In the early 2000s, new owners appeared who seriously undertook its restoration, including recreating the tower with the dome in its original place. In 2015, 108 years after its founding, the splendid Art Nouveau building at the intersection of the Moika River embankment and Gorokhovaya Street reopened its doors to visitors. It is worth noting that the "Esders and Scheefhals" company also built buildings in Wrocław, Vienna, Brussels, and Paris, but only the Petersburg and Paris buildings survived, the latter now housing the C&A department store.

Between 2009 and 2014, the building was restored by the company "BTK-Development." Among other things, the tower with the spire in the form of a caduceus (the staff of Mercury, the god of trade) was recreated, gilded inscriptions in Russian (spelling preserved in pre-reform, pre-revolutionary orthography – for example, "тужурки" [tuzhurki]) and French were restored, as well as the attic with the owners’ names.

No exact drawings of the spire have survived, so it was recreated based on sketches and photographs. But its size is exactly the same as the original – 29 meters tall. The building is an architectural monument of federal significance and is located within the boundaries of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg."

Sources:

https://kudago.com/spb/place/magazin-au-pont-rouge/

https://aupontrouge.ru/ru/history/

https://www.citywalls.ru/house473.html