Social Town of the Tashkent Textile Combine

The Tashkent Textile Combine was called the "firstborn of the cotton industry" of Uzbekistan, an enterprise of all-Union significance. Next to it, on the territory of the former old part of the city, a socialist settlement grew. In the summer of 1935, a kindergarten for two hundred children was commissioned here, painted with oil paint, with electricity, plumbing, and sewage. In the spring of 1939, the combine promised that the settlement would be replenished with twenty new multi-story buildings, and workers and employees would build up to two hundred of their own cottages on allocated plots; by the end of the five-year plan, a polyclinic, a club with a culture and recreation park, a sports base, schools, nurseries, kindergartens, and shops were to open, and the streets were to be landscaped and asphalted. By the spring of 1940, the Palace of Culture of Textile Workers was already operating in the settlement, and the Mukimi Theater performed on its stage. In December, the chairman of the Tashkent City Executive Committee, M. Isamukhamedov, summed up the results: on the territory of the former old part of the city, a "socialist settlement, numbering over 40 multi-story buildings with a living area of 40 thousand square meters," had grown up by the combine. After the war, the construction of the settlement continued. In 1946, the combine was building twenty single-apartment cottages and 24 dormitory houses, and 127 workers and employees received plots for their own houses. In 1949, they wrote about "up to 40 houses of 3-4 floors" and about the "magnificent building" of the Palace of Culture. In the summer of 1950, workers moved into a new two-story building with 18 apartments, another eight two-apartment cottages were being completed, and seven thousand trees and twenty-five thousand bushes were planted on the streets, with squares laid out on Shota Rustaveli and Stakhanovets streets. The tram stopped at a station that was simply called: "Socialist Settlement".

The residential blocks near the Textile Mill were not built like a regular city street. The houses here were not lined up along the perimeter of the block along the streets, but were placed in the way most advantageous for the cardinal directions: along the north-south axis. During the hot Tashkent summer, this directly affected the temperature in the apartments. The houses were sectional, with two apartments on each stair landing. This layout provided cross-ventilation, and each apartment received its own summer room, loggia, or terrace. In 1972, architectural historians summarized it this way: in the residential area of the Textile Mill, many principles of housing construction in Uzbekistan were "worked out", which later determined the features of the southern type of residential building. Two-apartment sections with cross-ventilation had already appeared in the Tashkent houses of Georgy Svarichevsky a few years prior. The town had several authors, and not all are known. The mill polyclinic was built in 1936 by Konstantin Babiyevsky, one of those who established architectural education in the republic. The mill residential building from 1938 is the work of M. Besprozvanny. The Palace of Culture of Textile Workers in 1940 was designed by A. Kornaukhov and A. Galkin.