20th Annual Strawberry Century: Fill & Download for Free

I remember going to strawberry festivals as a child, but no one told me why American Polish culture was strongly associated with that berry, where did it begin. I wrote this Question because my own research was lacking, along with a few others. It was immediately down voted. They all were. Is there some sort of Polish or Slavic prejudice on Quora? (Yes, but I don’t think that was what cause the negative actions.)(Skip to the end to read about Strawberry Festivals and Polish culture.)After a few weeks on Quora, I had several questions I wanted to ask. I had just gotten 100K views on one of my answers and some followers. I was feeling special and thought this would be a good time to ask questions.On the same day, I noticed all but two of my questions had stopped at a certain low view count. I asked my son what went wrong. He told me someone must have seen that I had multiple questions in a short time, didn’t like that, and reported or downvoted.Why would someone go after me for asking questions? I am sure everyone knows about the Quora Partner Program controversy. I have complained elsewhere that regular users are getting harmed because of the paranoia about the program. If they wanted new and fresh questions from sincere writers, they’ve missed their mark.So, what does this have to do with Polish People & Strawberry Festivals.This questions has two other public followers but few views.I doubt there will be more than a few people who will find the question or read this answer - but I remain hopeful someone will come along and help expand knowledge on the connections between Poles and Strawberries, especially in America.I believe there are people who want to know the answer to this question but a small group has decided to judge questions discriminatory on the basis of who they think the person is that wrote it. (It shows their judgement is flawed.) They sent this question to Quora purgatory. …But there is at least 3 people who are following this question - and I hope that is enough for someone to take the time to share their historical knowledge.What information I’ve found suggests many modern strawberry festivals are minimizing the connection with Polish culture, at least in public advertising, but also in decor, events and activities at the festival.I haven’t been to a strawberry festival in an area with a strong Slavic community for decades, so I don’t know if it is due to more diversity in the communities or due to other factors. This has meant less available historical information.The country of Poland has been a major exporter [1]of fresh and frozen strawberries, the conditions there allow for a good growing season, ripening in May/June. There are some strawberries[2] that are only grown in Poland, originally cultivated by Poles.I didn’t realize that strawberry pasta[3] was a Polish dish from the native land, it sounded like some sort of 20th-century Californian cuisine. When the Kansas Slavic Heritage community needed a location, they bought a historic building and then named it Strawberry Hill Ethnic Cultural Society[4]. The Kansas City district is named Strawberry Hill[5] because of the Slavic immigrants that moved there.In the Life and Histories of Hamtramck, MI[6] website, they have an audio telling of Michigan’s well-known St. Florian's Strawberry Festival in the former Polish community of Detroit. It is the last audio file on the page.“Cindy Cervenak[7] describes the rise and call of St. Florian's Strawberry Festival.[8] The festival celebrates the strawberry, the first fruit to be harvested in Poland in the spring. In the 1980s it was the biggest festival in Michigan and while it continues to this day, it tends to only sell about 200 Strawberry pies every year.”Near Portland, Maine, there is the city of Poland Spring where an annual strawberry festival[9] is held, though it is for the “Poland Spring” community.Ohio has a large Celebrate Poland[10] festival tied to a local strawberry festival:(Video) “Strawberry festival marks beginning of Celebrate Poland weekend”[11]Above dance video if from the Hamtramck St. Florian Strawberry Fest 2016, also known as the St. Florian Strawberry Festival - (Facebook).The festival brochure image is from their Facebook page.The top strawberry image at the very top is from Strona główna - poland fruits.Footnotes[1] Every second Polish strawberry is exported - report[2] How To Make The Most Of Polish Berry Season[3] Strawberry season![4] Olde World Christmas - Strawberry Hill Museum - Ethnic Cultural Center[5] Strawberry Hill (Kansas City, Kansas) - Wikipedia[6] Polish Heritage[7] Polish Heritage[8] Hamtramck: Saint Florian Strawberry Festival[9] Heritage Day and Strawberry Festival | Poland Spring Resort, [10] Celebrate Poland[11] Volunteers’ labor of love is strawberry shortcakes for Celebrate Poland

The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of their achievement as a band: their most fully achieved work, and the most coherent and characteristic album that they ever issued. It also contains in my opinion the greatest song that they ever wrote and recorded.It has the hallmark of a classic: it continually invites reinterpretation, and it never seems to go away. Just when we think we know everything about it, there turns out to be another way to look at it. This review will be an attempt to show how it does that.Be warned, kids: this review is so long that it has a goddamned contents page.Here it is:BackgroundRecordingCommentaryReception and InterpretationBackgroundBy 1966 the Beatles were in a car that was going downhill very fast. This is not to say that their career was going downhill; but they were a media juggernaut that was increasingly out of their manager Brian Epstein's control--and everyone else's for that matter. It wasn't so much that somebody was pressing the accelerator too hard; it was that nobody had their foot on the brake.-George MartinDuring the summer of 1966, a shadow was growing over the Beatles.Crowd control at their concerts was becoming a nightmare. A two-gig engagement in the Philippines turned into a debacle, when First Lady Imelda Marcos elected to ignore the fact that the Beatles had turned down an invitation to a televised party she was hosting.In March 1966, Lennon had made his ‘more popular than Jesus’ comment, and by August, it had been widely reprinted in the US in the September issue of Datebook magazine, just in time for the band to go on its Summer US tour. Death threats were issued against the band. The Ku Klux Klan nailed a Beatles record to a cross.The Memphis, Tennessee city council voted to cancel the Beatles’ 19 August concert, but the Beatles decided to perform anyway. During the concert, a lit firecracker was thrown onstage and the band thought that someone had tried to shoot at them.The Beatles had been talking about not touring any more. McCartney was the holdout, insisting that it was good for them. On 21 August—two weeks after a civil rights march in Waukegan, Illinois led by Dr Martin Luther King had been attacked by thousands of white counter-protesters hurling bottles, bricks and cherry bombs—the band played a midday concert in Cincinnati, then flew to St Louis to play an evening show at the Busch Stadium.It was pouring with rain. Water was dripping onto the amplifiers. The stage was as badly built as anything they’d ever played on. After the gig, the band was herded into a steel-lined van for the trip back to the hotel—McCartney remembered it as being like a removal van.That was the moment when he agreed with the others: you were right, that’s it, after this tour, it’s over.Eight days later, they played their last official concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Lennon set up a camera on the stage to photograph the occasion:They took a break.Lennon went to Spain to play Musketeer Gripweed in Richard Lester’s How I Won the War. McCartney wrote the score for the film The Family Way, or rather played a couple of tunes to George Martin, who turned them into variations. Harrison delved into Indian music and spirituality. Starr bought a house.In the rest of the world, Star Trek began screening on TV.Riots continued across the USA, in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Hollywood. The Sunset Strip Curfew riots inspired the Buffalo Springfield song ‘For What It’s Worth’.Albert Speer was released from Spandau prison.The Black Panthers were founded.LSD was banned in the USA.Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California.On 10 November, the newspapers contained the first reports that the Beatles would not be touring any more. It was widely speculated that they might be about to split up.On 19 November 1966, the band members reconvened for the first time since August, at Abbey Road studios, to make their next album.Before Sgt Pepper, the track, not the album, was regarded as the standard pop/rock recording. I use ‘track’ rather than ‘song’ to emphasise the fact that the track is the recording of the song, not the song as a purely musical entity: the track is the realisation of the song in performance and production.Albums were regarded as collections of tracks, not as coherent artistic achievements in themselves. Tracks could be issued as singles, or they could be stand-out tracks on albums, but albums were not expected to have any sort of overall coherence or conceptual or musical unity. This is why so many albums before 1967 struggle with the matter of ‘filler’: tracks a band had to record in order to fill up the space on the album. The Who’s first album My Generation has two tracks that we today regard as being classic Who tracks: the title track, and ‘The Kids Are Alright’. The rest is more or less OK filler.In the highly compressed evolution of rock music between 1965 and 1967, more and more bands began to play with the notion of extending beyond the boundaries of the three-minute song. Pete Townshend deserves credit for this, in his mini-song cycle ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’ from 1966’s A Quick One (US title: Happy Jack). But A Quick One the album is still not any kind of unified artistic achievement.The Beatles’ retirement from touring in late 1966 meant that there was a lot of speculation about what they were going to do next. This speculation built and built until, by the time Sgt Pepper was released in May 1967, it was one of the most anticipated albums of all time.RecordingThe first four songs recorded for the new album were ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ and ‘A Day in the Life’.The first two of these songs didn’t end up on the album. But for a long time they were regarded as being part of the project that ultimately issued in Sgt Pepper, so they deserved to be considered along with it.‘Strawberry Fields’ was written by Lennon while on location in Spain for How I Won The War, although it took a lot of demos and takes before finding its ultimate shape.‘Penny Lane’ was written by McCartney after he first heard ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, although he’d been talking about writing a song about Penny Lane as far back as October 1965. Another inspiration for McCartney was Dylan Thomas’ quasi-hallucinogenic recollection of childhood, ‘Fern Hill’:And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barnsAbout the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,In the sun that is young once only,Time let me play and beGolden in the mercy of his means,And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calvesSang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,And the sabbath rang slowlyIn the pebbles of the holy streams.Both ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’ are constructed, lyrically speaking, as imaginative returns to a simpler childhood, but they’re very different songs.Lennon’s song is written as an invitation to the listener to accompany him to ‘Strawberry Fields’, where there’s ‘nothing to get hung about’.Remember the death threats in the southern USA, a few months earlier? Lennon had faced the darkest consequences of his fame: people could actively hate him for the things he said. (This would eventually, of course, have him killed.)No surprise that he was longing for a simpler time in his life, when he could go to the annual garden party in the grounds of the Strawberry Field orphanage in Woolton in Liverpool.In the song, Strawberry Field gets transformed into ‘Strawberry Fields’, an image of Eden.But one of the most noticeable things about the song is the way it gets darker and stranger and more disturbing as it goes along: as in a bad dream, the closer Lennon tries to get to Strawberry Fields, the more it seems to pull away from him, with the light folk-rock texture of the beginning of the song turning into a harsh soundscape of brass, dissonant cellos and hammering percussion, before the song descends into atonal burbling from the Mellotron and muttered phrases (‘Cranberry sauce…’) As for how it does this, see here: Alex Johnston's answer to Which songs from the Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles is your favorite or your least favorite and why?In ‘Penny Lane’, by contrast, McCartney isn’t striving to go back to his childhood—he magically and effortlessly transports himself there, the song being as bright and cheerful as a sunny Saturday morning, fuelled by angelic, sighing backing vocals and a bubbling piccolo trumpet solo, blending the Beatles’ own mid-tempo swing with the Beach Boys and Bach. Harrison would say, in a 1967 interview, ‘We are not only involved in pop music, but all music.’ It sounded at the time like arrogance, but he was simply telling the truth.The writer Ian MacDonald has claimed that ‘Penny Lane’ is as hallucinogenic, in its own way, as ‘Strawberry Fields’, citing the fact that in the song it’s simultaneously sunny and raining, but all I can say is that, as a Scottish resident, the weather in the northern part of the island of Great Britain can be funny like that.The Beatles started to think of the next album as having a theme of childhood.The band worked on through Christmas 1966 and into January 1967, finishing these three songs. On January 19, Lennon brought a new song into the studio: 'A Day in the Life'.It was around this time that Capitol Records, the Beatles' US label, insisted that there had to be a new Beatles single. Epstein was already upset that the Beatles' release schedule had slowed down, so 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and 'Penny Lane' were issued as a double A-side. Epstein had a policy that Beatles singles couldn't be album tracks, so that nixed those two outstanding songs as far as the next album was concerned. Only a few weeks into recording, and the 'songs about childhood' concept was already looking shaky.But with Lennon made passive and easygoing by his heroic acid consumption, the Beatles' most normally dominant member was, for once, happy to go along with whatever the other guys wanted. And there was at least one member of the band who really wanted the next album to be a good one.During the band’s break in autumn 1966, Paul McCartney had become the last Beatle to take acid.It didn’t have quite the earthshaking effect on his robust psyche as it had on Lennon’s more fragile one, but it did fill him with a sense of renewed possibility. He was listening to the albums coming out of the USA, notably the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out!, and was determined that the Beatles had to at least match the level of creativity on these albums.Flying back from a November 1966 trip to Kenya with the band’s assistant Mal Evans, McCartney was thinking about how the Beatles 'were fed up with being the Beatles':We really hated that fucking four little mop-top approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn't want any more, plus, we'd now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than performers.McCartney's curiosity and outward-looking approach (as opposed to Lennon's introspection) made him fascinated with the then-current trend for surreal, faintly Edwardian band names that were becoming popular: Quicksilver Messenger Service, 1910 Fruitgum Company. (In the Anthology video, remembering years later, he busked the fictional name ‘Colonel Mustard’s Medicinal Compound’, referencing the hit ‘Lily the Pink’ by his brother Mike’s band Scaffold.)Observing Evans fiddling with the salt and pepper on his meal tray, McCartney dreamed up Sgt Pepper. Scribbling on a napkin yielded Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.A band playing music for a club composed of lonely-hearted people. What a metaphor.McCartney had always been the most sociable and outgoing Beatle, and the one who’d written their most compassionate song thus far, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, with its bleak portrait of an unloved spinster dying and being forgotten. (Lennon tended to feel sorry for himself; McCartney, more resilient by nature, tended to feel sorry for other people.)But in November 1966, this remained a vague idea in McCartney's mind. He didn't yet have anything to show for it.At some point—Beatles chronology is, however minutely detailed, a mish-mash of meticulous studio records and fallible personal recollection—the idea of a childhood-themed album was no longer on the table.But what was still on the table was the notion that, if they weren’t going to tour any more, they would have to up their game and deliver an album that was a bit more unusual.At some point, McCartney suggested to the others the idea of recording the album as the Sgt Pepper band. McCartney later talked about how he thought the idea that the band could literally pretend to be other musicians would be a 'freeing element', a sort of tongue-in-cheek Liverpudlian prefiguring of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, in which suggestion cards prompt the musician to approach a piece of music from a new angle.Maybe McCartney's idea did prompt a new level of creativity, and maybe it didn't. They certainly didn’t record more than three songs as if they were that fictional band: tracks one, two and eleven. But their confidence was at a high, and the band was working together.After a a long period of development, 'A Day in the Life' was in the can by 22 February.Then, it was a matter of the other songs.Like all the Beatles' albums up till that point, Sgt Pepper had to be finished in a hurry.CommentaryMcCartney's ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ took the nascent sound of heavy rock music being developed in London clubs by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and blended it with the Edwardian brass band music that the band members had heard in childhood. (In my own childhood in Dublin in the 1970s, a park across the road from my grandparents’ house had a bandstand, and Sunday afternoons in their garden would often be accompanied by the sound of an unidentified brass band playing tunes on that bandstand.) It was a fine, striking opening, a self-conscious 'Welcome back' to the listener. Maybe McCartney's weedy lead guitar tone on his Fender Esquire lets it down, a little. But in its fusion of heavy rock and brass band music, it was unlike anything else anyone was doing at the time.It segued neatly into 'With A Little Help From My Friends', the obligatory Ringo vocal, which didn't tease or play up to Ringo's comic persona (as previous Ringo songs like 'Act Naturally' and 'Yellow Submarine' had done) but brought him into the circle as a full and valued member of the band.Again, check out how Ringo subtly varies his drum part from verse to verse. The lines 'What do you see when you turn out the light? / I can't tell you but I know it's mine' have, as McCartney acknowledged, a superficial suggestion of furtive masturbation, but they also suggest something a little deeper and more mysterious. By the end of the song, Ringo's vocal has merged with the backing vocals. It's the ultimate Ringo song: simple, touching and heartfelt.Lennon's 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' was, as we all know, inspired by a picture that Lennon's son Julian had made in school, but its Lewis Carroll-ish imagery of newspaper taxis and journeying into a strange new world reflects the Beatles' own sense of moving into a new land. It can be heard as a more benign take on the same experiences that had prompted 'Strawberry Fields Forever'.'Getting Better' is an example of how the Beatles smuggled dark material into pop songs: its bright sound belies the fact that it's about breaking away from painful and damaging experiences. McCartney has talked in interviews about his lifelong disinclination to do whatever he's told, no matter who was telling him to do it. Lennon's interjection 'It can't get no worse' is said to have been improvised by him on arriving at the studio while McCartney was running through the song for the others; it certainly gives the song weight, and the final verse, a confession about abusing one's partner, could arguably be said to be true about any of the band, all of whom were less than perfect lovers and husbands at various times of their lives.Musically, it's a more taut variant on the kind of song 'Penny Lane' is, with those measured fourth-note guitar/piano chords, deepened and darkened by Harrison's use of the tambura in the final verse. It's not as cheerful as its reputation suggests: it wants to be cheerful, but is forced to be realistic.'Fixing a Hole' was inspired by McCartney's repairs to his newly purchased Scottish farmhouse on Kintyre, but it's also about the freedom to dream and play, something that was clearly on the band's mind, given their newfound freedom from the grind of unsatisfactory touring. It's notable for, among other things, Harrison's guitar solo, played (unless my ears deceive me) on his dayglo Fender Strat. Unlike almost all guitar solos of the period, it starts high on the instrument and works its way down to the bottom. Eric Clapton has said that one of the bases for his friendship with Harrison was that he recognised that Harrison wasn't just a Beatle who happened to play guitar, but an individual guitar stylist. Nobody else played solos like this back then, least of all McCartney.'She's Leaving Home' is, I think, persistently underrated, even by some fans of the band.As a construction, it's beautiful. The structure is wonderfully economical, and the basic situation, of a young woman leaving her family home because she can't communicate to her parents and has found the possibility of love elsewhere, is the kind of thing that only McCartney, of all the members of this band, could have come up with. It was inspired by a real life news story, but I personally think that the conventional interpretation, in which the protagonist of the song is a very young woman, lacks weight. The line 'She's leaving home after living alone for so many years' suggests to me a protagonist who could well be in her late twenties, or even older. The phenomenon of unmarried women continuing to live with their parents until early middle age wasn't unknown in Britain then, and is still commonplace in other parts of the world. I think that if we hear the protagonist of 'She's Leaving Home' as being over thirty, the song gains more force, especially as even as an adult, she can't write a note that would explain as much as she wants to explain.The fact that the song is written and played like a 19th century parlour song with a late 20th century sensibility only points up how original it is. Lennon's contribution is wonderfully McCartneyesque: he wrote and sings the parents' interjections in the chorus, inspired by the kind of thing his aunt Mimi would say.'She's Leaving Home' is about what the protagonist of 'Eleanor Rigby' would have done, if only she'd had the courage, or been less beaten down by life.The origins of Lennon's 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite' are well known: he took the words from a Victorian circus poster he'd bought. The actual song is a charming novelty number, but apart from its retro appeal, it makes sense as the end of side one, the obligatory commercial for local attractions in the intermission.The silly novelty song on a Beatles album was usually Ringo's job, but here, it's as if Lennon is taking one for the team, another hint at the generally collegial nature of the album. The song is not without darkness, though: on the Love album, the version of this song segues from the line 'And tonight, Mr Kite is topping the bill!' straight into the nightmarish final section of Abbey Road's 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)'.Harrison's 'Within You Without You' I've written about at length elsewhere: Alex Johnston's answer to In what ways did the Beatles song Within You, Without You combine aspects of Eastern and Western music? Suffice it to say that it's the first truly successful fusion of Indian classical music with Western pop song structure. Harrison's intensive study of Indian music with Ravi Shankar really paid off. Lyrically, it's a lecture, but it's urging us to love one another. You can have worse lectures.While still working on ‘Strawberry Fields’, and at a point where they were considering recording an album full of songs about childhood, the band had recorded McCartney’s ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, a song that McCartney had written years earlier, when he was 16.‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ is routinely dismissed by rock purists as an example of McCartney’s ‘granny music’, but I think that if we don’t understand why it’s on Sgt Pepper, we will never get the point of the album.In late 1966, the Beatles had for the first time experienced the world turning on them, and refusing to be taken in by their charm and their tunes and their wit. ‘WI64’ is one of those English 60s pop songs like the Kinks’ ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ and the Small Faces’ ‘Lazy Sunday’ that uses the music-hall style of early 20th century British popular music to depict a realistic scenario.But the Kinks and the Small Faces were still focused on themselves: ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ is a satire on the kind of sharp-dressed guy that the Kinks were. ‘Lazy Sunday’ was actually inspired by Steve Marriott’s arguments with his neighbours, and in the song, he’s still himself:Wouldn't it be nice to get on with me neighboursBut they make it very clearThey've got no room for raversThey stop me from groovin', they bang on me wallThey doing me crust in, it's no good at allThe way Marriott half sings, half snarls ‘Lay-zee Sun-day after-noon-ah!’ was a direct influence on John Lydon’s vocal style in the Sex Pistols.‘When I'm Sixty-Four’, however, is flat-out pedestrian Northern realism, presenting the most mundane details of everyday life as if they were something to aspire to:I could be handy, mending a fuseWhen your lights have goneYou can knit a sweater by the firesideSunday mornings go for a rideDoing the garden, digging the weedsWho could ask for moreThis is the truly subversive and invisibly strange thing about Sgt Pepper: at a time when the Beatles’ generation was asserting its difference from their parents’ generation, the Beatles offered up this song as one that their parents could play for each other. It contributes to the general feel of Sgt Pepper as being holistic: everyone is being included.Let’s hear it for Ringo’s immaculate drumming on this song, by the way, especially his exceptionally nimble ride cymbal work at 1:50–1:57.It was recorded in the key of C major but was sped up a semitone to Db, partly because McCartney wanted to sound younger but also to make it more ‘rooty-tooty’. Lennon plays finger-style electric guitar in the last verse, and at 2:23 his stylistically inappropriate folk-blues picking makes McCartney audibly smile while he’s singing.McCartney's 'Lovely Rita' was inspired by his being given a parking ticket by a female traffic warden, Meta Davies. Initially the title character was a negative one, but Lennon and McCartney agreed that 'it'd be better to love her.' The result was one of the horniest songs the band had written since 'I Saw Her Standing There', with McCartney's narrator evidently turned on by the fact that Rita's uniform 'made her look a little like a military man'. Harrison's characteristic guitar styling makes for the opening acoustic lick; the song devolves into panting and grunting, as if Rita and the narrator 'made it' on the sofa after the sisters had gone to bed. It's hardly the strongest Beatles song ever, yet the underlying idea—take the characteristic establishment hate figure of the traffic warden, and make her into a love object—is somehow characteristic of the Sgt Pepper vibe.Lennon's 'Good Morning Good Morning' is one of the most fantastically earthy and rhythmically irregular songs the band ever did. The verse switches between bars of 5/4, 4/4 and 2/4 and Starr makes it seem completely natural by treating the song on a beat-by-beat basis. The underlying narrative, of a guy who sets out in the morning in a foul mood but who by evening is 'in gear' and hoping to check out girls, is entirely in keeping with the basic positivity of the Pepper band. The feel of the song is great: crunchy, dirty and visceral. It tails off into animal noises—supposedly arranged in such an order that each animal could be eaten by the succeeding one, but whatever. During editing, George Martin noticed that a last chicken squawk ‘rhymed’, musically speaking, with the twang of a guitar being tuned, helping to create one of the band’s most thrilling segues……a continuous tapping noise leads us, via various bits of echoey studio talkback, into McCartney’s last count-in: One, two, three, four—Lennon throws in a sly Byee!—And then Ringo kicks off 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)', one of the band’s best rock & roll songs. Fast, tight, tough and grimy, it's a true band performance, and the increased tempo makes the original version sound plodding by comparison. A slick modulation half-way through raises the level of excitement.McCartney almost always gave the count-in on Beatles songs—he’d done it on track one, side one of their first album, although the actual count-in on ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ (One, two, three, FAW!) was from a different take than the one that they ended up using. The fact that they left the count-in on this song, as well as Lennon’s laconic farewell, creates a sense of closure that links this song not only the title track of the album but also to the very beginning of their recording career.This is the end of part of their career.The mono version comes with extra incoherent raving from McCartney in the song's closing seconds, but as the applause and cheers ring out, it's an exhilarating finale to an album.Except that, as we’re about to realise, it isn’t.'A Day in the Life', as Allan Moore observes, starts before the previous song has even stopped. Lennon's pensive strummed guitar (Gmaj, Bmin, Emin, Emin7, Cmaj, Gmaj) is in sharp contrast to the previous song's drive.There's something about the way 'A Day in the Life' emerges sombrely out of the whooping and cheering of the Reprise that makes me think of smoke clearing. It’s subtly disturbing.It's as if the party’s over, the veil is being lifted, and now we're coming face to face with reality.And the song itself reinforces that, being one of the most casual-sounding intros to a Beatles song: just a guy strumming a guitar and singing about something that he saw, in a thin, rather melancholy, echoing voice.I read the news today, oh boyAbout a lucky man who made the gradeAnd though the news was rather sadWell I just had to laughI saw the photographThis is weird. Hardly even bothering to rhyme. And what does 'made the grade' mean, and since it sounds like a good thing, why is the news sad?He blew his mind out in a carHe didn't notice that the lights had changedA crowd of people stood and staredThey'd seen his face beforeNobody was really sure if he was from the House of LordsNow we're getting more: some hints of a road accident, although 'blew his mind out also suggests' suicide and drugs...what happened, exactly?We don't know. We're not told.It's just something the singer read in the news. Whatever.You have to laugh.Note the way that, although there are at least three Beatles playing now (Lennon on guitar, McCartney on piano and Starr on drums), the effect as if there's only one person: the accompaniment is confined to effects (McCartney's booming piano chords, Starr's perfectly timed, improvisatory slack-tuned drums) that emphasise the solitariness of the singing voice.It doesn't feel like a group. It feels like a guy alone in a room.I saw a film today, oh boyThe English army had just won the warA crowd of people turned awayBut I just had to lookHaving read the bookJust another stupid war film, then. Most people aren't even interested. But our man has to look, to consume the sight of it, because he knows how it's supposed to end.I'd love toTu-u-u-u-u-u-u-rn you-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou o-o-o-o-o-onnnnnnn...And all of a sudden the bottom seems to drop out of the music, we're left hanging, while the singer tantalisingly suggests that he wants to do something to us, anyway, but we don't have time to wonder what, because apart from the steady, mechanical pulse of a piano and a faint voice counting numbers in the distance there's OH FUCKING HELL WHAT THE HELL IS THAT NOISE...A slowly building wall of discordant noise, the sound of what it feels like to feel sick, or mad, or so removed from your surroundings that you can't take the outside world seriously, and it's building and building and building and getting louder and louder and louder and adding on overtones and more sounds until it's a giant wall between us and the song, and just when we think oh please no come on I can't take it anymore it's louder still, and louder, until it's the only sound in the world......and then it explodes into a chord, and is over, and there's just the piano, playing that same chord, and we're back, and an alarm clock goes off.And an entirely new song starts, sung by someone else, right up in our ear.It's a dark morning bedroom. You can almost smell the unwashed sheets.Woke up, fell out of bedDragged a comb across my headFound my way downstairs and drank a cupAnd looking up, I noticed I was latePause for some heavy breathing: our (new) man? His dog, eager to go for a walk?Found my coat, and grabbed my hatMade the bus in seconds flatFound my way upstairs and had a ssssmokeAnd somebody spoke, and I went into a dream--There's something deliberately provocative about the way McCartney forces the 's' in 'smoke'.But we're no sooner with our harassed everyman than we're back in the original song, now winding its way through a mighty chord progression with the original singer wordlessly ahhhh-ing in the background. What is going on? Is our man falling back asleep?The orchestra we heard before is back, but it's behaving itself, playing titanic chords to accompany our dream.Then, with a huge, decisive, five-note phrase, we're back to where we were, except now the song is more brisk, the drums pattering away underneath:I read the news today, oh boyFour thousand holes in Blackburn, LancashireAnd though the holes were rather smallThey had to count them allNow they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert HallThere's something mocking about the way that last line seesaws between two notes a semitone apart for most of its length.But oh shit, we've been here before, haven't we, and yes:I'd love toTu-u-u-u-u-u-u-rn you-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou o-o-o-o-o-onnnnnnn...It's back, that hellish noise, and it seems to be getting louder faster, and once again we seem to be receding from the world we know, the world of pianos and guitars and words and meanings, into a world of pure chaos and noise and abstraction where we can make nothing make sense except that whatever it is it's getting worse, and the noise builds and builds and builds and builds, seeming almost to throb as if it's alive, until we are lost inside this vast dark cloud of meaningless noise--Dah!CLANNNGGG!Two chords, one from the orchestra, one from what sounds like the biggest fucking piano in the world, and it takes forever to die away, as we listen in relief to the growing silence.And we feel...what, exactly?I always hear the piano chord at the end of 'A Day in the Life' as a kind of bow that the magician delivers to the audience, a musical equivalent of the choreographed bow that the band used to give its audiences on the prompting of Brian Epstein. Mach schau, boys, mach schau, their German employer Bruno Koschmider used to tell them, imitating their earliest manager Allan Williams: Make show, boys, make show.The piano chord is the band saying: That's it. See ya.As we sit there, disoriented, feeling rather like someone who's just been subjected to the most intense fucking of our lives, going: What did you just do to me?And the piano fades and fades to nothing, and then silence.Nevercouldbeanyotheritnevercouldbeanyotheritnevercouldbeanyotheritnevercouldbeanyother...Reception and InterpretationWhen the Beatles first appeared on the music scene, there was no other group quite like them.They looked alike. This wasn’t unusual among British groups, but the usual format was a singer and his backing band. The Beatles’ smart, showbiz-minded manager Brian Epstein recognised from the start that the band didn’t fit the usual format. No one of them stood out as the obvious leader. Lennon was funny and sharp and sarcastic, but abrasive; McCartney was cute and charming and friendly, but less funny; Harrison was dry and laconic and watchful; Starr was the kind of guy who says nothing for minutes and then drops a well-placed remark. They were a group. That was the point.Epstein’s ambition was to make the Beatles as big as Elvis. He did this by tailoring their outward image, to make them as appealing as possible, to as broad an audience as possible.Before the Beatles, the image of rock and roll music had been rebellion: leather and sideburns and motorbikes and snarling at the older generation. Elvis had had a natural element of that, which he’d turned into a marketing tool by appearing in bland movies. The Beatles themselves had dressed all in leather once. The Rolling Stones wouldn’t wear leather, but they did adopt the rock & roll rebel posture of not smiling in pictures, and flattering their audiences into thinking themselves bold and brave for being consumers of the music.Epstein’s genius move was to persuade the Beatles—I think, rightly—that this image was old hat.That, in 1961, if you wanted to get somewhere, you had to think ahead.The only way to be bigger than Elvis was to be unlike Elvis. To not pretend that you were a teenage delinquent.Cliff Richard, the British pop musician who’d been the biggest thing before the Beatles, had practised looking broody and curling his lip like Elvis, but it was all bullshit. He was an immaculately behaved young man named Harry Webb. The Beatles—who were, in their early years, far from immaculately behaved young men—didn’t want to be like Cliff.They didn’t want to look like a secondhand knock-off of the musicians they revered. (The only reason Elvis isn’t on the cover of Sgt Pepper is that they respected him so much that they couldn’t place him in the company of lesser mortals.)The Beatles were forced to be themselves.Contrary to legend, Epstein never changed their sound, only their look. He got them to stand still on stage, instead of jumping around and laughing. He put them in suits. He had them photographed in cool black and white, rather than garish colour.The Beatles didn’t sound like anyone else, but they looked different from everyone else, too. Epstein said that their appeal lay in the fact that they were ‘a blend of tragedy and comedy’.They were all things to all people. Kids liked their songs because they were tuneful, teenagers adored them because they were idols, adults were intrigued by them because they appeared not to take their celebrity seriously.Their fame happened because people clustered round to see what the fuss was all about, and stayed because the music had the power to keep their attention.And then, in 1966, when they had been at the top for so long, it started to go sour.Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was their response.Sgt Pepper was not, at the time, universally recognised as some sort of transcendent masterpiece. At least one review in the UK press was positive but run-of-the-mill. Richard Goldstein in the New York Times wrote a strongly negative review, saying ‘the overall effect is busy, hip and cluttered’ and criticising what he heard as over-production. But even Goldstein was disarmed by the epic ‘A Day in the Life’:It has nothing to do with posturing or put-on. It is a deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric. Its orchestration is dissonant but sparse, and its mood is not whimsical nostalgia but irony. With it, the Beatles have produced a glimpse of modern city life, that is terrifying. It stands as one of the most important Lennon-McCartney compositions, and it is a historic Pop event.But the majority of reviewers were agreed that Sgt Pepper was something new, and received it as such. Tom Phillips in the Village Voice called it ‘the most ambitious and most successful record album ever issued’.And there were features about the album itself, that conveyed the strong impression that it was a coherent statement.One was the packaging. The spectacularly expensive gatefold cover was the first ever to print the lyrics on the back. It unfolded into a photo of the band smiling into the camera, and included a card insert with cutouts of Sgt Pepper, a cardboard moustache, etc., as if the listener was being invited to play at being in the band.(The insert card)Another was the sequencing. The sequencing makes the listener feel that some kind of statement is being made, even if it’s hard to say exactly what. Placing ‘A Day in the Life’ outside the continuity of the Pepper band’s performance, practically forces the listener to hear it as a comment on that performance, or as an alternative perspective on it.But the sequencing of Sgt Pepper was not a carefully thought-through statement by the band.The title track had to come first, obviously. 'With A Little Help from My Friends' had to come after it, because they segued into each other. George Martin liked to stack the first side of an album with what he considered stronger cuts, and have the last song on side one be a stand-out, which is why the widescreen circus fun of 'Mr Kite' is the last song on side one.The reprise of the title track obviously had to come at the end. But you couldn't possibly put anything after something so titanic as 'A Day in the Life', so the reprise of the title track had to go before it.And so, because of numerous factors, some of them outside the band's control, the album finally assumed the shape that it took.This is partly how Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band creates the impression of being ‘organically conceived’, even though it wasn’t, and as being in some way coherent.It's as extraordinarily stylistically diverse as their last album Revolver, but it's far more coherent in its emotional generosity. There's a generally positive and warm tone of the songs: there are sad songs and serious songs on Sgt Pepper, including ‘A Day in the Life’ itself, but that song is hugely ambiguous—by turns melancholy, disturbing, dry and ironic.But there are no songs as purely bleak as 'Eleanor Rigby' or as purely downbeat as 'She Said She Said'. The album radiates warmth. Sgt Pepper seemed to want to welcome everyone, at least until you get to ‘A Day in the Life’, where it becomes a lot less clear what, exactly, we’re being welcomed to. Was it a last-minute afterthought, a kind of disclaimer? No; as we’ve seen, it was one of the first songs on the album to be recorded. For almost all the process of making the album, they’d already recorded its final track.The word ‘love’, and notions of love and togetherness and community, recur through the album, from track to track:You’re such a lovely audience, we’d like to take you home with us, we’d love to take you homeWould you believe in a love at first sight? Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the timeIt’s getting better since you’ve been mineWe gave her most of our lives, sacrificed most of our livesWith our love we could save the worldWill you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-fourLovely Rita, meter maid, where would I be without youSomebody needs to know the time, glad that I’m hereWe’re sorry but it’s time to goSgt Pepper’s lonely, Sgt Pepper’s lonely, Sgt Pepper’s lonely, Sgt Pepper’s lonely,I’d love to turn you onBut I think that it was this emphasis on love and generosity and togetherness that doomed the album to failure with a certain kind of listener. Because, in the summer of 1967, not everyone wanted to welcome everyone, and they still don't.Sgt Pepper was the moment on which the Beatles truly, heroically blended tragedy and comedy.Nobody had ever issued a pop/rock album which gave such an overwhelming impression of being a coherent artistic statement. Despite the somewhat haphazard circumstances of its making, in that respect, it was a game-changer for popular music, just as much as Beethoven’s Third Symphony was one for the music of its time.As to what that statement actually is…Well, that’s why we've been arguing about it for the last 50-odd years.Thanks for reading.(The Beatles at the launch party of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Photo: future vegetarian food magnate Linda Eastman.)AfterwordOn reading this answer back, it occurs to me that some readers might be thinking: That’s all very well, Johnston, but Do you like it?My answer is: That’s not important. I don’t write answers this long about albums that mean nothing to me, obviously. Sometimes I want to listen to Sgt Pepper on repeat; other times, months go by when I don’t think about it at all.What I wanted to do was talk about Why it got made the way it did, and Why it seems important. I wanted to write a review that would persuade people that they can’t just dismiss it.Hopefully, that was achieved.Cause now I don’t want to have to think about it again for a while.(Sources:Cambridge Music Handbooks: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Allan E. MooreSummer of Love: The Making of Sgt Pepper, George MartinRevolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties, Ian MacDonaldThe Complete Beatles Chronicle, Mark LewisohnAnthology, The BeatlesThe Beatles Reader, ed. Charles P. NeisesTwilight of the Gods: The Beatles in Retrospect, Wilfrid MellersRead the Beatles, ed. June Skinner SawyersThe Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, Walter EverettMany Years From Now, Barry MilesMagic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, Devin McKinney)

Top 12 unusual places in St. Petersburg that you need to see at least once in your life1) Winter Canal Embankment2) St. Petersburg Buddhist Temple3) Rotunda on Gorokhovaya4) Belfry of Smolny Cathedral5) Republics of cats6) Street art museum7) Vitebsky Station8) Bolsheokhtinsky bridge9) Doctor Pely Pharmacy10) Necropolis Museum of Urban Sculpture11) Eliseevsky shop12) Botanical Garden Water Conservatory1) We suggest starting with a walk along the embankment of the Winter Canal. This is one of the shortest canals in the city. Its length is 228 meters and the width does not exceed 20 meters. It is located in the very center of the Northern capital, near the Winter Palace, and connects the rivers - the Big Neva and the Moika.It was dug in 1718-1719, the work was supervised by the famous builder-contractor Vasily Ozerov. This part of the embankment became one of the first stone embankments in the city. By 1787, a three-story building of the Hermitage Theater and the Great Hermitage were built on 2 opposite banks of the canal. Two buildings at the level of the 2nd floor were connected by a passage resting on a powerful arch thrown over a groove.In 1782-1784, the embankment grooves were chained to the city’s traditional granite and decorated with strict lattices. The canal received its first name in 1738 - the Old Palace Canal, but in fact it was not used. People called the canal Zimnedomsky, Zimneredvortsovym or simply Winter. Since 1768, the right bank was called Postal Street, since nearby, on the current Millionnaya Street, was the Postal Courtyard. The modern name has been known since 1801.The first wooden drawbridge was thrown over the canal in 1718-1720, immediately after the channel was dug at the Winter Palace of Peter the Great according to the Dutch model. Now 3 bridges are thrown over the Winter Canal: 1st Winter (on Millionnaya St.), 2nd Winter (on the Moika Embankment) and the Hermitage (on Palace Embankment), the former Winter Palace.The first Winter and Hermitage bridges were built in the 18th century, and the Hermitage Bridge became the first stone bridge in St. Petersburg. The second Winter bridge was built in the 1960s, It was built specially according to the old style, so as not to destroy the atmosphere of Pushkin Petersburg.The small channel is famous for its musical and cinematic interest. In his opera Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky “The Queen of Spades”, in the 3rd act introduces an element of the plot, which is absent in the eponymous novel by Pushkin. It became the original literary version of the musical work.This applies to the moment when the heroine of the composer Lisa throws herself from the Hermitage Bridge into the waters of the Winter Canal, as Herman, who is obsessed with 3 maps, runs away from her. Tchaikovsky did it under the influence of the real fact of the suicide of a certain Julia Perova, who committed on this site on the basis of unhappy love. That fact was described in one of the Petersburg newspapers of 1868. It is known that in 1890 Pyotr Ilyich sent a newspaper clipping to his brother Modest with a request to include Lisa's suicide in the libretto of the opera. Therefore, you can hear the second name of this bridge - "Lisa Bridge".Also, the Zimnyaya Kanova embankment fell into the film of A. Balabanov's "Brother" when the protagonist Danila Bagrov walks around the city upon arrival in St. Petersburg and walks along Millionnaya Street, crossing the Zimnaya Canal. If you like this film, and you want to "remember" everything on your feet, you can see it again with your eyes, but changed and modern after 20 years.address: metro station admiralteyskaya embankment of the winter groove2) Datsan Gunzechoynei ", it is the name of this Buddhist temple in St. Petersburg, translated from the Tibetan" Gunzechoynei "means the source of the holy teachings of the All-Compassionate, Hermit Master. It is the northernmost Buddhist temple in the world. It belongs to the Buddhist traditional sangha of Russia, Gelugpa school.It is also one of the most expensive Buddhist temples in Europe. The dasan in St. Petersburg was built from chipped granite and from many other valuable materials. The temple is a monumental work of art, also famous for the chic stained glass windows that Nicholas Roerich made. On them, the artist depicted 8 good Buddhist symbols.From the chronicles you can learn that the first Buddhists on the banks of the Neva were the Volga Kalmyks, subjects of the Kalmyk Khanate, which became part of Russia in 1609. During the construction of the Peter and Paul Fortress, with which St. Petersburg was erected, Buddhists worked hard with other workers, and lived nearby, in the Tatar settlement, located behind the crown cover, in the area of ​​the present Bolshaya Spasskaya Street.However, in later sources of the XVIII - mid XIX centuries there is no mention of the Kalmyks, or representatives of the Buddhist denomination living here. The Buddhist community in St. Petersburg began to form at the end of the 19th century.In 1900, the representative of the Dalai Lama XIII in Russia - Aghvan Dorzhiev received permission to build a church in St. Petersburg. In 1909, Dorzhiev bought a plot of land on the northern outskirts of the city, on the banks of Little Nevka. The project was developed in accordance with the canons of Tibetan architecture in 1909, student of the Institute of Civil Engineers N. M. Berezovsky and architect G. V. Baranovsky - the author of the project Eliseevsky deli on Nevsky Prospekt.Construction was carried out in the years 1909 -1915. The first Buddhist service took place in 1913 in honor of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. For the temple, King Siam Rama the Fifth presented a statue of Buddha. The consecration of Datsan took place in the capital on August 10, 1915. Not a very good fate befell Datsan and his ministers at the beginning of Soviet power and during the Great Patriotic War. The temple was closed, and the building was transferred to the possession of athletes.Datsan gets into the plot of the story "The Old Woman", written by Daniel Harms in 1939. When the hero travels in a commuter train from Finland Station to the Lisiy Nos station and tells what he sees from the window:We drive through Lanskaya and Novaya Village. The golden top of the Buddhist pagoda flickers, and the sea appears.During World War II, a military radio station was built in the church. She remained in the building until the 1960s and was used as a “jammer”. In 1960, Yu. N. Roerich and a number of other orientalists achieved that the building should be transferred to the Academy of Sciences. Then there were laboratories of the Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.Only in 1968 the temple was declared an architectural monument of local importance. In 1990, the decision of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council was transferred to the Central Spiritual Administration of Buddhists of the USSR. In 1991, the temple received its modern name - Datsan Gunzechoynei, the Tibetan name given to him during the consecration.After 3 years, the new burkhan of the Big Buddha Shakyamuni, made by Mongolian masters in the traditional Mongolian style - from papier-mâché, with the subsequent coating of the figure with gold leaf, was installed in the main altar of the temple. Since then, Datsan has been visited by Tibetan and Western teachers. Within its walls they give lectures on Buddhist philosophy, as well as special teachings and initiations to the laity. They also conduct meditation retreats, which, according to the teachings of Buddhists, serve as a practice for accumulating good merit and a way of self-knowledge.Buddhist monks regularly perform prayers for the well-being of the living and for the best rebirth of the dead. In addition, astrologers and Tibetologists, specialists in the field of traditional Tibetan medicine, conduct receptions in the community.Address: metro station m. "Staraya detevnya", Primorsky Prospect, 913) The famous Rotunda is an unusual front door of an ordinary-looking house No. 57 on Gorokhovaya Street, which is considered almost the most mystical place in the Northern capital. A house with a rotunda is also known as the house of Yakovlev, or the house of A.F. Evmentiev.The story about the architectural features of this house should not begin with the building itself, but with Gorokhovaya Street. This highway is the central axis of the classic St. Petersburg "trident", one of those "perspectives" on which the "lead" system of the imperial capital was built.In accordance with the original plan, the axial street was emphasized by the dominant - the admiralty spire and small half-areas at the intersection of the highway with river embankments. Half-areas are considered the work of the famous Russian urban planner of the XVIII century A.V. Kvasova.Houses in such a grandiose composition are minor details. The house with the rotunda was built by the architect Ferri de Pigny at the turn of the 1770-1780s’. The rotundanot only blends perfectly with the general architecture of the building, but also features a beautiful spiral staircase, which makes it possible to circumambulate and smoothly climb in a spectacular geometrically verified space.For classical architecture, the rotunda, located in the inside of the house, in the center of the architectural composition, is a characteristic decor. In addition, the combination of a circle and a rectangle in plan is one of the architectural archetypes. It is here that the roots of the mystical history of the building sprout. The magnificent park arbor, hidden from the eyes of passers-by and built into an unremarkable house, certainly gives rise to a lot of myths and legends.Address: Sadovaya metro station, Gorokhovaya street, 574) The belfry of Smolny Cathedral is one of the best viewing platforms in St. Petersburg. The height of the cathedral is 93 meters. And you can look at the sights of St. Petersburg from a 50-meter height. Tourists are attracted not only by the observation deck, but also by what they hear and see, breaking 277 steps up. Baroque music sounds during the ascent, and “along the way” you can see the masonry from the time of Rastrelli.According to the layout of the ensemble of the Smolny Monastery, which is stored in the Museum of the Academy of Arts, the bell tower should have been erected 140 meters high. It would have been 18 meters higher than the height of the spire of the bell tower of the Peter and Paul Cathedral, and could have become the tallest building in Europe.The first tier of the bell tower should have looked like a triumphal arch, the main entrance to the monastery, the second - the gate church, and in the remaining 3 belfries should have been located. The bell tower was to be completed by a small turret with 4 round windows and a crown crowning it with a cross.But these plans were not destined to be realized. Rastrelli began to erect Smolny on the orders of Empress Elizabeth in 1748. Thanks to the completed layout, the architect realized the mistake and retained the dominant influence of the only buildings of the cathedral itself. And he became for the townspeople a very unusual creation and an outstanding work of art, for the author a kind of symbol of the violation of European traditions. This time, a master who worked in baroque combined in this masterpiece the baroque elements of overseas architecture with Russian architectural delights, folk identities and the ancient culture of Russia, which makes the latter look incredibly solemn and elegant.Even the ardent opponent of Bartolomeo Rastrelli, Giacomo Quarenghi, an adherent of the baroque style, the author of the strict Smolny Institute, a supporter of classicism, and perhaps the most prolific representative of Palladianism in Russian architecture, admired the Smolny Cathedral. And whenever this architect and Vedutist of Italian descent passed by his rival’s brainchild, he always took off his hat, pronouncing with genuine admiration: “This is a temple!”You can admire the colorful Smolny today, as well as the beautiful city on the Neva from a bird's flight, climbing the cathedral belfry. Conquering the height of Smolny, getting to its observation deck, is so easy. Why? It’s calmer and more spacious, fewer people, and the review can’t be expressed in words how good it is, and you can look at everything well here with the help of free binoculars, for example, the Petrograd side, and it’s incredibly nice to see how ships navigate the Neva, how beautiful and restless Petersburg is.Address: metro station "Chernyshevskaya", Rastrelli Square, 15) Cotocultural center appeared in the Northern capital in 2008. In Vsevolozhsk, on the basis of the Elvet veterinary clinic, the Cat Museum was opened, which has become a vivid attraction of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region. Today it can be called a big tourist cat-mecca. The museum and its branches implement the project of Yuri Kuklachev "School of Kindness".The first kotokafe (cat cafe) in Russia and Europe was opened in St. Petersburg in 2011 - "The Republic of Cats", which is located on Yakubovich 10. This is the center of the Kotokulturnaya capital of the country and a branch of the first Cat Museum in Russia. You can come here for cat therapy, where you will find yourself in the company of 25 cats of 17 breeds, including the Hermitage cats. You can: stroke, take pictures, play with them. This is the most beautiful place for cat lovers, and tourists come here from all over Russia and the world.The "Republic of Cats" is located on Liteiny Prospekt 60. The institution is positioning itself as the largest cat-cafe in Europe, in which up to 60 cats and cats live at the same time. Visit time - unlimited, admission for a voluntary donation (donation). It is also a concert venue, a place for seminars, master classes and children's events in the company of cats.The city on the Neva became the Cotocultural capital. St. Petersburg has acquired new symbols of the city - cats. Before entering the arch at the “Republic of Cats” on Liteiny, another monumental symbol of the city will soon appear: “The Cat in the Sack”, the creation of which is currently being carried out by the sculptural father of Funtika, Semyon Platonov.The fact is that 2 years earlier in the very center of the Northern capital, not far from St. Isaac’s Cathedral, near the “Republic of Cats” on Yakubovich Street, a bronze figurine of the kitten “Funtika” was installed, the fruit of love “Elisha” and “Vasilisa” from Malaya Sadovaya streets. The author of the monument, as mentioned above, was the sculptor Semyon Platonov, and, now, the idea belonged to the historian Sergei Lebedev."Funtik" is known for fulfilling children's desires. It is installed at a height accessible to the smallest children, it can be stroked and scratched behind the ear just like a real kitten. In gratitude for this, Funtik fulfills the wishes that the kids make, they only need to whisper cherished dreams in his ear. Also there is another sculptural cat-masterpiece: the keeper of republican cats - "Cat Basil".The new cat-symbol of the Northern capital - "Puss in a Poke" will serve people faithfully. He can be admired, and also, which is important for Petersburgers, he can be told about all his desires. “Puss in a poke” will sensitively listen to each of its guests, regardless of age, and will try to fulfill any even the most ambitious and financial dreams.Address: Admiralteyskaya metro station, st. Yakubovich, 10metro station "Mayakovskaya", Liteiny ave., 606) The Museum of Street Art is located on the territory of existing production in the east of St. Petersburg. It was opened in 2012. Famous artists of our time have already visited and left his creations in his workshops. This is a new format of museums, including street type.Unlike the usual gallery, the exposition is located on the territory of the conserved industrial zone. Here you will not find classic exhibits under glass or in a shop window, as we see in a traditional museum space. Compared to a street museum, which is usually subject to a common theme, here you can look at various works.In this museum, each exhibit is self-sufficient, unique in its own way, with its own history and even character. All of them are exhibited in the open air, and most importantly, of enormous size, there are exhibits the height of a whole house. The collection is constantly updated and updated. One of the reasons why creative people like to come here often is to see the novelty for joy.Each new visit gives as many unexpected and pleasant surprises as a first-time visit. The territory of the museum is divided into two zones - a permanent exhibition, which is located in the area of ​​the existing production of the “Laminated Plastics Plant”. Here is an annually updated collection of monumental murals by contemporary street artists. The second zone is a public venue where temporary exhibitions are shown to guests, and various events are held here.address: metro station Ladozhskaya, 84 Revolution Highway (entrance from Industrial Avenue)7) From this station, the history of Russian railways began. Vitebsky Station - the oldest of the 5 stations in St. Petersburg, the very first station in Russia. From here in 1837 the first train went to Tsarskoye Selo. The station today takes from there and sends electric trains there. Want to visit Tsarskoye Selo? Of course, Tsarskoye Selo - a museum-reserve should be visited at least once in a lifetime. First, take a good look at this unique and ancient station, and immediately go on an excursion to the city of Pushkin, where you can visit the Museum-Lyceum of A.S. Pushkin, where the Tsarskoye Selo with the famous Catherine Palace and its delightful Amber Room, with magnificent parks, etc..Start exploring the Vitebsk station. At first, there was an ordinary one-story wooden building, which made it a small station, as in some provincial town. But Petersburg was still the capital. And no good, the authorities thought. And in 1849-1852 a solid stone building was built on this site according to the project of the architect K.A. Ton, the author of the Moscow station. The construction was done in a classic style. Years later, it fell into oblivion.In 1904, according to the project of academician of architecture S. A. Brzhozovsky, a huge station complex in the "modern" style was erected in its place. To this day, the Vitebsky Station is not inferior in beauty and grandeur to its European railway "brothers." In its decor, you can see openwork lattices, various modernist delights, many unique architectural elements, sometimes differing from classical St. Petersburg.Now all this can not but arouse admiration, and in those days, at the beginning of the last century - as everything here was a curiosity. The station is equipped with all modern technical means. Vitebsky Station is loved by filmmakers. He got into the frames of such films as “The Twentieth Century Begins”, “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”, “Station for Two”, “Brother”.AddressPushkinskaya metro station ", Zagorodny prospekt, 528) Bridges of St. Petersburg is a separate huge novel in the history of the glorious city on the Neva which not surprisingly is called the city of bridges. To see them all - about 300, you need to live here for more than one year.During sightseeing in the Northern capital, it is impossible not to admire the most famous of them - Palace Bridge and Trinity Bridge. And we want to focus your attention on this unique crossing, first of all, on the most charming - Peter the Great Bridge - Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge.Many tourists find in it and in its surroundings a resemblance to the London surroundings. It was not without reason that in 1983 part of the bridge fell into the scenes “Treasures of Agra” from the series “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson”. Filmmakers were able to convince domestic audiences that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were chasing criminal Jonathan Small on the Thames in London.Also in 2013, scenes from the film "I Make a Decision" were shot at the bridge. In 2015-2016, on the Bolsheokhtinsky bridge and its environs, they shot the 2nd season of the series Major. But most importantly, why you need to see him at least once in your life, suddenly you are lucky. According to legend, one of the rivets in the construction of the Bolsheokhtinsky bridge is gold. No one has yet found her.AddressChernyshevskaya metro station, Bolsheokhtinsky bridge9) Some consider the "Doctor Peel Pharmacy" not only ancient, but also strange, some as the most mysterious and mystical, as a whole, picturesque corner of history in St. Petersburg. In reality, the pharmacy building looks authentic, inside - at least, everything breathes in the past and is full of rarity.Here you can see old appliances from Pel’s workshop, a bulky telephone, funny cones and leather chairs from those times, etc.. This is a place where you can endlessly examine various historical exhibits. Among them there is a stuffed crocodile. The logo itself with a black silhouette of the owner, in whose honor the pharmacy was named, is quite mesmerizing in the cylinder.But let's start all over again. This drugstore appeared in the capital on Bolshaya Meshchanskaya in 1760. Here, its grand opening took place. And she was called differently. In 1770, pharmacist Aric moved her to the 7th line of Vasilievsky Island, where she is to this day.The pharmacy had several owners. In 1850, it was acquired by Vasily Vasilievich Pel. Then at once she was given the name of the new owner, and she is called the "Pelya Pharmacy" from then until today. Pel was seriously engaged in his favorite business: he transformed a pharmacy laboratory, introduced quality control of raw materials, and created a warehouse of benign drugs.In 1867, even Pel founded the Russian Society for the Sale of Pharmaceutical Goods. Since 1871, he serves as a reliable supplier of medicines to the imperial court. After the death of Pel, the son continued the work of the father, in the future the pharmacy was managed by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Vasily Vasilyevich.However, during the Soviet era, the laboratory and the factory did not work in the pharmacy. She was given another name - "Andreevskaya", which was understandable, since it was opposite the Andreevsky market. In the Great Patriotic War, the pharmacy did not close, oddly enough, but no matter how scary it was, because shells were aiming at it, and yet it hit the building and inflicted damage on it.Alas, in 2005 there was a fire in it. Fortunately, in 2010 the oldest drugstore was restored, and in the same year it was already serving customers. Since 2011, excursions have been held at the Doctor Peel Pharmacy, and she annually participates in the Museum Night project."Doctor Pelya's Pharmacy" is located in the house 16-18 on the 7th line of Vasilyevsky Island, but the building was not such when VV Pelyu got it. In 1858, houses were combined. In 1907, a corner house was built on, as well as floors: 3rd, 4th, 5th and attic. In 1910, the facade was decorated in the contemporarily modern style. Thanks to these reconstructions, the name of Professor Pelya Vasily Vasilyevich and his descendants went down in the history of St. Petersburg. On top it all you should be intrigued even more. As they say briefly on a page in a group:A new series is being shot at Doctor Pehl's Pharmacy! "Silence. Camera. Get started!"AddressMetro station "Vasileostrovskaya", 7th line V.O.10) The Necropolis of the Museum of Urban Sculpture is the Necropolis of the 18th century and the Necropolis of Artists. The necropolis of the 18th century and the Necropolis of art masters are important sights of St. Petersburg, where they come to pay tribute to the great figures of the past.In the XVIII century Necropolis a unique collection of works of memorial art of the XVIII - XX centuries. Here you can see the monuments to famous writers and scientists: M. V. Lomonosov, D. I. Fonvizin; architect: A.N. Voronikhin, J. Tom de Tomon, D. Quarenghi, K.I. Rossi; sculptors, political and military figures, as well as many other famous Petersburgers - in total more than 1000 monuments. The Lazarev tomb contains more than 80 tombstones, including monuments to prominent figures in Russian history :: B.P. Sheremetev, I.A. Hannibal, F.P. Uvarov.Artists come to the Necropolis to pay tribute to musicians and artists, poets and actors. There are memorials to M. I. Glinka and P. I. Tchaikovsky, N. M. Karamzin and F. M. Dostoevsky, I. I. Shishkin and I. N. Kramsky, V. F. Komissarzhevskaya and G. A. Tovstonogov and about 200 other artists. An exhibition dedicated to the monumental sculpture of St. Petersburg has been placed in the exhibition hall on the territory of the Necropolis, temporary exhibitions are held here.This complex also includes Narva Gate and Anikushin's workshop. The necropolis was founded at the beginning of the 19th century, when there was no more space in the old cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. It was here that many famous cultural figures of the 19th century were buried. Unfortunately, in the 30s of the XX century, some graves were destroyed.Address and opening hoursMetro station "Alexander Nevsky Square", Nevsky pr., 179Necropolis of the XVIII century: 9: 30–18 :: 00, seven days a weekNecropolis of Masters of the Arts: 9: 30–21: 00, Thu - from 9:30 to 18:0011) In the very heart of St. Petersburg, on its main highway - Nevsky Prospekt, opposite the Catherine’s Garden there is a legendary deli known throughout the world. His story is amazing. In 1812, on one of the magical and frosty Christmas evenings, Count Sheremetev’s serf gardener, Peter Eliseev, presented the guests with a dish of freshly grown strawberries.All those present were so amazed at the fresh, sweet and fragrant berry in the winter that the Count was ready to fulfill any desire of his faithful servant and talented gardener. Sheremetyev asked Eliseev what he wants for this charm. Eliseev quickly answered: "Freedom." The count kept his word, although it was a pity to lose the brilliant gardener. He gave freedom to Peter. "And a hundred rubles ... for the establishment," - at the request of Princess Dolgoruky, who was present at the evening. A 100 rubles of lifting - a lot of money at that time. For comparison, a good mansion could be built for them.Without hesitation, in fear that the count would not change his mind, Peter Eliseev took his whole family with his belongings and went to conquer the capital. He immediately bought a bag of oranges, went to Nevsky Prospect and began to trade. After 90 years, his descendants in the same place opened a grocery store, glorifying the family name for centuries.The building was designed by one of the largest architects and public figures of the late XIX - early XX centuries - G.V. Baranovsky. In the Soviet era, the "Eliseevsky" store "on Nevsky Prospekt 56 was renamed as" Grocery Store No. 1 ". However almost no one called it that; among the people, it still remained Eliseevsky.Since then, the "Shop of the Merchants Eliseevs" has always been a refined atmosphere and luxurious interior. Today it is restored from photographs of 1903. In addition to the luxury of decoration in the deli, you can see all kinds of inimitable delights, most importantly, here you can buy: various fish, meat delicacies, confectionery and alcoholic beverages, any gastronomic works of art and indescribable goodies.A cafe is open for Petersburgers and city guests on the Neva River, where they enjoy coffee with dessert and the atmosphere of the early 20th century. In the "Shop of merchants Eliseev" it is pleasant to be and make purchases. Eliseevsky grocery store is easy to find. It differs on Nevsky with its colorful showcase and striking design. Locals love the local delicious and fragrant pastries, eclairs - melting in your mouth. What is more many there you can purchse many other culinary masterpieces that you really can not see in other stores of the Northern capital.Address and opening hoursGostiny Dvor metro station, Nevsky pr., 56/8Daily from 10:00 to 23:0012) In summer, the Botanical Garden opens for visitors one of the "pearls of a blossoming museum" - the Victorian Orangery. It was revived and received the first visitors, connoisseurs of beauty in 2015. For winter, the water route is closed - it is exclusively a summer pleasure.The Victorian greenhouse was arranged in the garden over 100 years ago. Its highlight is the pool - one of the largest greenhouse reservoirs in the world. Under the glass dome stretched the water surface of the pool, where you can see wonderful lotuses and several types of giant water lilies. Also, guests are shown rhizophores, pandanuses, sugarcane, water hyacinth, Egyptian lotus, rice and much more. Making water routes, participants in walks in the greenhouse observe the beautiful flowering of lotuses, which lasts all summer. Garden employees write:In St. Petersburg, lotuses can bloom. Is this not evidence that anything is possible?In the water conservatory you can admire the largest water lily in the world - Victoria of the Amazon. Its homeland is the water elements of the Amazon and Lake Titicaca. This beautiful water flower was named after the British Queen Victoria. The diameter of round leaves is about 2 meters. And withstand capable floating saucer weight up to 50 kilograms. So, not only an inch or a child, but also a teenager, or even a small one, a thin adult can calmly sit on a "flower", or even swim.Address and opening hoursMetro station "Petrogradskaya", st. Professor Popov, 2Tue-Sun 10: 00-16: 30″© Необычные места в Петербурге, которые нужно увидеть хотя бы раз в жизни