Alberta street
A full row of Eizenstein facades.
Dmitrij M — CC BY 3.0 · Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Scotch Mist — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Scotch Mist — CC BY-SA 4.0
A vast economic boom at the end of the nineteenth century made it one of the Russian Empire's fastest-growing cities, so it expanded beyond its walls all at once exactly when the style flourished — and nearly its whole centre went up in one idiom.
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The city with more Art Nouveau than any other on earth: a third of central Riga's buildings — over eight hundred — went up between 1899 and 1914 in an enormous building boom, which is why UNESCO listed the city in the first place. No single building is the destination; the streets themselves are. Its heart is Alberta street: a full row of facades crowded with giant female faces, lions, masks and writhing plants, most designed by Mikhail Eizenstein (father of the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein) — look up and never at the ground. At number 12 the Art Nouveau Museum occupies a flat furnished entirely in 1903 style, with a painted spiral stair. The district runs on into Elizabetes, Strēlnieku and Vīlandes streets, bounded by Bastejkalns park and the city canal — half an hour's walk from the old town, and the walk itself is the visit.
A full row of Eizenstein facades.
A fully furnished 1903 flat with its painted stair.
Boats and a park dividing old town from new.
Alberta iela, Riga