GUM (department store)
GUM (
The most famous GUM is the large store facing
As of 2021, GUM carries over 100 different brands,[1] and has cafes and restaurants[2] inside the mall.
Moscow GUM
Design and structure
With the façade extending for 242 m (794 ft) along the eastern side of Red Square, the Upper Trading Rows were built between 1890 and 1893 by
The glass-roofed design made the building unique at the time of construction. The roof, the diameter of which is 14 m (46 ft), looks light, but it is a firm construction made of more than 50,000 metal pods (about 743 t (819 short tons)), capable of supporting snowfall accumulation. Illumination is provided by huge arched skylights of iron and glass, each weighing some 740 t (820 short tons) and containing in excess of 20,000 panes of glass. The facade is divided into several horizontal tiers, lined with red Finnish granite, Tarusa marble, and limestone. Each arcade is on three levels, linked by walkways of reinforced concrete.
History
By the time of the
GUM continued to be used as a department store until
After reopening as a department store in 1953, GUM became one of the few stores in the Soviet Union that did not have shortages of consumer goods, and the queues of shoppers were long, often extending entirely across Red Square.[7]
Several times during the 1960s and 1970s, the Second Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Suslov, who hated having a department store facing Lenin's Mausoleum, tried to convert GUM into an exhibition hall and museum showcasing the achievements of the Soviet Union and Communism, without the knowledge of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Each time, however, Brezhnev was tipped off and put a stop to such plans.[8]
At the end of the Soviet era, GUM was partially, then fully, privatized, and it had a number of owners before it ended up being owned by the supermarket company Perekrestok. In May 2005, a 50.25% interest was sold to Bosco di Ciliegi, a Russian luxury goods distributor and boutique operator. As a private shopping mall, it was renamed in such a fashion that it could maintain its old acronym. The first word Gosudarstvennyi ("state") has been replaced with Glavnyi ("main"), so that GUM is now an abbreviation for "Main Universal Store".
See also
References
- ^ "All stores of GUM". gumrussia.com. Retrieved 2020-10-14.
- ^ "Cafes and restaurants in the main department of the country". gumrussia.com. Retrieved 2020-10-14.
- ISBN 0-520-06929-3.
- ^ a b Pomeratzev, Alexander. Верхние торговые ряды на Красной площади в Москве. 1890–1893 (in Russian). Russian Educational Portal. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 20 April 2013.
- S2CID 144010294.
- Librusek. Retrieved 20 April 2013.
- ^ "History of GUM" (in Russian). Official GUM website. Retrieved 20 April 2013.
- ^ Thelman, Joseph (December 2012). "The Man in Galoshes". Jew Observer. Retrieved 28 February 2021.
Sources
- Brumfield, William Craft, (1991) The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, ISBN 0-520-06929-3
- English, Elizabeth Cooper (2000). "Arkhitektura i mnimosti": The origins of Soviet avant-garde rationalist architecture in the Russian mystical-philosophical and mathematical intellectual tradition", a dissertation in architecture, University of Pennsylvania
- Hilton, Marjorie L. (2004). "Retailing the Revolution: The State Department Store (GUM) and Soviet Society in the 1920s". Journal of Social History, (Oxford University Press) 37 (4): 939–964; 1127. ISSN 0022-4529
- Rainer Graefe, Jos Tomlow: "Vladimir G. Suchov 1853–1939. Die Kunst der sparsamen Konstruktion." 192 S., Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1990, ISBN 3-421-02984-9