Chkalovskaya

The station "Chkalovskaya" is stylized on the theme of the old "lamp" aviation. It is named after the famous Soviet pilot Valery Chkalov. The avenue where the station lobby is located is also named in his honor.

The station hall is stylized as an airfield with arrows on the floor, and the lights on the sides of the hall resemble the designs of the ANT-6 aircraft.

The end of the underground hall is decorated with a stained glass window with a man-plane.

Interestingly, I once happened to be at this station during a local blackout - when the entire line was plunged into darkness. And only slowly, slowly creeping trains illuminated the expanses of the stations with their windows. In the St. Petersburg metro, as far as I know, this has happened only once. It's still better with the light.

At the other end of the hall there are escalators. The hermetic door is traditional, vertical, of the "guillotine" type.

The doors in the track walls are simple, without decorations. But there are very interesting benches on the axis of the hall.

Above the exit there is an end lamp stylized as a propeller. The same lamps are located on the sides of the escalator exit to the station hall.

Here, on the other side of the hermetic door, there is another panel - also with the image of a man-bird.

From September 1997 to January 1999, Chkalovskaya was the northern terminus 5th Purple Line. The station temporarily had to be made final due to the delay in the readiness of the next two stations, so the сrosshairs of railway tracks was built in ready-made tunnels at a considerable distance from the station — about halfway to the station Krestovsky Ostrov.

Let's go upstairs. The escalator passage is an ideal dream of a cleaner, because the lamps are located not on the balustrade, but on the ceiling, and when wiping the balustrade with a wet rag, they do not need to be bent around every time.

Upstairs is an ordinary lobby, without any special beauties. It is built on a high stylobate due to the threat of flooding in this area of the city. This is one of the few underground vestibules of the late 20th century that has preserved the panoramic glazing of the facade from floor to ceiling.

Just near this lobby in 2006, one of the scenes of the cute movie "Petrsburg FM" was filmed.

Here is the very monument to Valery Chkalov, near which the main character of movie was hopelessly waiting for his lady.

Let's go back down.

When GSM was just starting to appear in Saint-Petersburg, then it was the only operator “North-Western GSM”, the future Megafone, and there was no underground GSM network in Russia yet - the Chkalovskaya station was the only one where communication was steadily caught by two or three divisions at the bottom near the escalators :) By the way, Megafon was the first in Russia and the fifth in the world to deploy an underground GSM network in the Saint-Petersburg metro. In Moscow GSM underground appeared much later.