Plodik
The Neighborhood Built on Cans
If you look at Almaty from space, you can recognize two distinct urban ecosystems. In the center of the city, large housing projects can be seen, long Lego blocks with green courtyards in between them. On the periphery, the organized grids give way to chaotic clumps of private homes - the chastny sektor [частный сектор], or "private quarter." These zones, which you can think of Apartment Land and House Land, are fairly well segregated, but in their meticulous master planning, the Soviets still weren't able to fully consolidate the center with prefab towers. Oases of cottages remain amongst the concrete, and one of these is called Plodik.
Plodik gets its name from the Plodokonservny Kombinat [Плодоконсервный комбинат] or "Canning Factory", a large plant built in 1936 to produce canned tomatoes, halva, and jam. During World War Two, the plant ran at full steam, sending tinned meals to the eastern front, and a neighborhood of factory workers sprung up around it. Many of the structures are quaint Russian-style cottages from the relatively golden decades that followed, with a small district of two-story factory-built apartment buildings in the district's upper reaches. The plant itself is still on Zhandosov Street east of Kablukov, but since independence it has been transformed into a smaller operation filling cartons with a nectar called Juicy, and on half of its property a large discount supermarket has been built. The Plodik oasis is spread out across the street, north of Zhandosova, strung through with a row of massive power pylons and the canalized banks of the Bolshaya Almatinka river.
The first thing I noticed strolling around Plodik was that it had more hand pumps on its quiet streets than I'd ever seen before in any other hood. These pumps, planted in the middle of the last century, are hard to find these days in Almaty, and their rarity makes them even more precious for a nostalgic generation that remembers drinking straight from the tap during the summer scorchers of their youth. One Walking Almaty reader, Julia Golovina, sent in just such a memory when I posted a Plodik pump on Instagram and Facebook:
"[I] always drank from such 'kolonka' as a kid on summer days, together with other kids, we were to lazy and busy to get on higher floors to drink at home in our flats... Thanks for such a reminder, never came across them since they disappeared in our city."
A poster on the forum, "Reconstructing Alma-Ata from Memory" (a great resource by the way), also waxed nostalgic:
"Oy, I remember how during my childhood, there were pumps all up Mynbaev street, and how super tasty the water was..."
Seeing me photographing all of Plodik's pumps, one man, drunk already early in the morning, led me to another he knew of down the way, and he told me that most of them had stopped working in the last few years. Indeed, some of them had been partially dismantled so that water trickled out though there was no lever to pump it, but others had been fitted with new PVC piping and kept alive.
Plodik gets its name from the Plodokonservny Kombinat [Плодоконсервный комбинат] or "Canning Factory", a large plant built in 1936 to produce canned tomatoes, halva, and jam. During World War Two, the plant ran at full steam, sending tinned meals to the eastern front, and a neighborhood of factory workers sprung up around it. Many of the structures are quaint Russian-style cottages from the relatively golden decades that followed, with a small district of two-story factory-built apartment buildings in the district's upper reaches. The plant itself is still on Zhandosov Street east of Kablukov, but since independence it has been transformed into a smaller operation filling cartons with a nectar called Juicy, and on half of its property a large discount supermarket has been built. The Plodik oasis is spread out across the street, north of Zhandosova, strung through with a row of massive power pylons and the canalized banks of the Bolshaya Almatinka river.
The first thing I noticed strolling around Plodik was that it had more hand pumps on its quiet streets than I'd ever seen before in any other hood. These pumps, planted in the middle of the last century, are hard to find these days in Almaty, and their rarity makes them even more precious for a nostalgic generation that remembers drinking straight from the tap during the summer scorchers of their youth. One Walking Almaty reader, Julia Golovina, sent in just such a memory when I posted a Plodik pump on Instagram and Facebook:
"[I] always drank from such 'kolonka' as a kid on summer days, together with other kids, we were to lazy and busy to get on higher floors to drink at home in our flats... Thanks for such a reminder, never came across them since they disappeared in our city."
A poster on the forum, "Reconstructing Alma-Ata from Memory" (a great resource by the way), also waxed nostalgic:
"Oy, I remember how during my childhood, there were pumps all up Mynbaev street, and how super tasty the water was..."
Seeing me photographing all of Plodik's pumps, one man, drunk already early in the morning, led me to another he knew of down the way, and he told me that most of them had stopped working in the last few years. Indeed, some of them had been partially dismantled so that water trickled out though there was no lever to pump it, but others had been fitted with new PVC piping and kept alive.
Following the power lines north (or "down", as mountain-oriented Almatians would say), I ended up in a patch of company-built barracks, with the old lanterns, wooden doors, and brick sheds that characterize Stalin-era mass housing, before the buildings got bigger and precast. I chatted up an older fellow about the complex, and he said that though they still called the neighborhood Plodik, hardly anybody in the area still worked at its namesake. The jobs had mostly disappeared in the 90s depression, and he looked depressed himself, unsatisfied with these scruffy buildings on a dead-end street.
The river Vesnovka, farther east in the center of town, has a popular parkway running along it, but Plodik's own Bolshaya Almatinka was empty of people and poor, less accessible from surrounding streets and feeling more criminal for it. Across the river, the neighborhood continued, with all the hallmarks of House Land: barking dogs, handpainted addresses, and homes with lovely eaves. Just half a kilometer west was the king of Apartment Lands, the massive zone locals call the mikry, or "microdistricts", large self-contained housing projects with names like "Microdistrict 7" or "Microdistrict 8." Plodik was hemmed in, and I got the feeling it was only a matter of time before it got wiped out by developers.
I walked back towards Zhandosov, and there I found the canning factory, inaccessible with its concrete walls. That this was once the heart of a neighborhood certainly wasn't apparent. It felt like any other industrial space that Almaty once produced, rusted and shady. Yet this was a property that made a community, a community built on cans and fruit juice and hard work, a community on its last legs, remembering the cool well water of childhood before everything toppled.
The river Vesnovka, farther east in the center of town, has a popular parkway running along it, but Plodik's own Bolshaya Almatinka was empty of people and poor, less accessible from surrounding streets and feeling more criminal for it. Across the river, the neighborhood continued, with all the hallmarks of House Land: barking dogs, handpainted addresses, and homes with lovely eaves. Just half a kilometer west was the king of Apartment Lands, the massive zone locals call the mikry, or "microdistricts", large self-contained housing projects with names like "Microdistrict 7" or "Microdistrict 8." Plodik was hemmed in, and I got the feeling it was only a matter of time before it got wiped out by developers.
I walked back towards Zhandosov, and there I found the canning factory, inaccessible with its concrete walls. That this was once the heart of a neighborhood certainly wasn't apparent. It felt like any other industrial space that Almaty once produced, rusted and shady. Yet this was a property that made a community, a community built on cans and fruit juice and hard work, a community on its last legs, remembering the cool well water of childhood before everything toppled.
