The first story is about a repentant drunkard. Russian money tycoons are widely able to walk. But it turns out that they can “tie up” in style. So the house with the glass turned upside down on the roof is a vivid example of this. It belonged to merchant Filatov, a famous cutile, who almost drank all his money. But after vowing not to drink, he became rich again and built an apartment building, and ordered to put a symbolic upside down glass on the roof so that everyone could see that he no longer drinks.

However, there are other versions. They say that the house was built by the father of a drinking merchant and promised to give it to his son if he gave up the addiction. However, there is another assumption that the mother of the same merchant, on the advice of a priest, built this house for renting apartments to the intelligentsia at the lowest prices — all for her son to put an end to drunkenness. And I did achieve my goal!

Historians have other guesses. This house was built by two architects with a time interval of three years. The left half of the apartment building was erected in 1904 by Ernest Nirensee, a supporter of constructivism with its minimalism and functionalism, and the other half, covered with a glass, was finished from 1907 to 1909 by Valentin Dubovskaya, a lover of pseudo-Gothic Art Nouveau. So the notorious shot glass is actually a Gothic dome.

And local historians say that merchant Yakov Filatov was a prominent representative of the Moscow Old Believers community. If we remember that for drunkenness, the Old Believers excommunicated a person for life from the church (and posthumously for smoking), then the inverted glass gets a completely different meaning.