Zaryadye Park

This guide to Zaryadye Park in Moscow starts on the cantilevered bridge over the Moskva River and works backward through the neighborhood beneath it: a crowded riverside district once home to tens of thousands, cleared out in the 1890s, then rebuilt and demolished more than once across the Soviet era. You'll hear about a vast hotel that briefly stood as one of the largest on earth, and the decade the ground sat empty before planners decided what should replace it. Pause at the far end of the bridge, where nothing but its own shape holds you up.