mostly horses. 1783 flood destroyed most of Balchug and Sadovniki, including the St. George bell tower. By 1786, the city built the original Vodootvodny Canal, a flood control dike following the old river bed. The first metal bridge in Moscow, Chugunny Bridge (1830), connected Balchug with the Zamoskvorechye mainland. A steel bridge north, to Red Square and Zaryadye, was completed in 1872. Until the 1930s, Balchug remained a street of two-story shops; the only four-story building belonged to the Novomoskovskaya Hotel (now the ). Construction of the new Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge (1938) changed the street's status again. The main north-south artery moved west, bypassing Balchug. Houses between the bridge and Balchug street were razed (the northern end of this site remains vacant). What was left in the 1930s was destroyed in the 1990s. First, the old Balchug Hotel was built out from 4 to 9 stories high, then a Central Bank building replaced the few surviving buildings between the bridge and Balchug. One 19th century single-story building remains as a facade curtain for a nine-story office block (see facadism). Vodootvodny Canal In 1692 Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge, the first permanent bridge in the city, linked Zamoskvorechye with the city to the north. Four years later, Russia's first triumphal arch was built in front of the bridge in order to welcome Peter I's return from the Azov campaigns. In 1783, the area was swept away by a severe flood that damaged the bridge; in order to repair it, the Moskva River was temporarily drained, while its old riverbed was reconstructed into the four-kilometer-long Vodootvodny Canal (English: "Water Bypass Channel"), which is now spanned by ten bridges. Kazakov's developments The first documented project was drawn in 1775, presumably by Matvey Kazakov (senior). In addition to separating Balchug Island from Zamoskvorechye, he proposed cutting two flood control dikes west of Bersenevka to create two more islands. In the east, he planned to flood uninhabited farmland and connect the canal to Moskva River inside the present-day Garden Ring; the island's east would also serve as the city's grain port and warehouse. The moat east of Balchug had to be cleared and widened, too. This plan was implemented in between 1783 and 1786 (the grain terminal was never built). An 1807 plan shows only one additional island west of Bersenevka; otherwise, it follows Kazakov's project, with the main island cut into two halves by the Balchug