Северная корона, Abandoned hotel construction on Karpovka River embankment, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Severnoye Korona, or Northern Crown, was an unfinished twelve-story brutalist tower on the Karpovka River embankment in Saint Petersburg, planned as a hotel with 247 rooms. The heavy concrete structure stood in the Petrogradsky district and remained incomplete for decades before being torn down.
Construction began in 1988 during the final years of the Soviet Union and stopped when the country collapsed, leaving the site without consistent funding or ownership for years. The structure was finally demolished between 2019 and 2020 to clear the land for new housing.
The building was designed by architects Anatoly Pribulsky and Mark Reinberg in the late Soviet brutalist style, where raw concrete and heavy geometry define the look. This approach was common in large Soviet hotel projects of the 1980s, where function came before decoration.
The site on the Karpovka embankment has been fully cleared and is now an active construction zone, so there is nothing left of the original building to see. Visitors passing through the area should stay on public paths and keep a safe distance from the fenced construction work.
In the 1990s, the abandoned shell gained a reputation as a cursed place after a series of accident reports that circulated among locals. This notoriety drew urban explorers and curious visitors for years, many of whom documented the interior before the building was torn down.
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