In 1905, architect Alexander Ustinovich Zelenko returned from the United States and began to tell with admiration the young teacher Stanislav Teofilovich Shatsky how Americans raise children. Seeing the burning eyes of a new acquaintance, the architect decided that it was time to organize a kindergarten. Moreover, not noble families will study there, but poor people from Suschevo and Maryina Roshcha.

At the beginning of 1907, two friends collected 40 thousand rubles, bought a small plot and erected a building on it - and immediately opened children's clubs, classrooms and workshops, a library and a small theater. But both friends did not limit themselves to this - a little later, a people's observatory appeared here, equipped with the efforts of his son V. M. Vasnetsova.

The glory of the kindergarten for the poor thundered throughout Moscow, and at the wrong time: the tsarist authorities closed it, accusing it of implanting socialism. But not for long — soon the kindergarten resumed its work, under the name “child labor and recreation”. But the Bolsheviks, on the contrary, liked the work of two friends. An experimental station for public education was opened here, and then a house of pioneers. Now the premises of the former house of “Child Labor and Recreation” have been occupied by various organizations.