Once upon a time, this place was a wooden Mytny Dvor, and in 1755, the famous architect Rastrelli erected a temporary Winter Palace for Elizabeth Petrovna at this address. The palace, which is also wooden, was dismantled immediately after the construction of the “real” stone Winter Palace was completed.

The classicist house that can be seen on Bolshaya Morskaya Street today was built in 1768, when the site was bought by Police Master General Nikolai Ivanovich Chicherin. It is not known which of the architects of that time the general turned to - most likely, the author of the project was Yuri Felten, an assistant to the Execution.

After Chicherin, both Prince Kurakin and merchant Kosikovsky became the owners of the house, and in 1858 it passed into the possession of merchants Eliseevs.

Bolshaya Morskaya 14 has a rich literary past. Griboedov and Kuchelbecker lived here, Pushkin and Dostoevsky often visited, and in the novel Eugene Onegin, the main character goes to the Talon restaurant located here.

In Soviet times, the building was turned into a House of Arts, and the literary elite - Gorky, Tsvetaeva, Andrey Bely, Blok, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova - gathered here again, even read their works within these walls Herbert Wells.

In 1961, the former Chicherin house became the Barricada cinema, where you could see the latest domestic feature films and listen to lectures about cinema.