Before the formation of the Babolovsky Park, the low-lying wetland with spruce forest in the floodplain of the Kuzminka River belonged to the peasants of the village of Babolovo, whose name comes from the Finnish - Pabola.

A walking road lined with trees ran along the water pipeline route. It is known that Catherine II inspected all the engineering structures of the water pipeline in 1774 and drove along it to Taits.

In 1775, a marble Milestone Pillar with a sundial was installed near the pool. Since the Sofia postal yard was then located near it, the first on the road from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the distance to St. Petersburg and Moscow was indicated on the “marble milestone pyramid.” From him the name, which began right there, was given to the Pillar Road (now Park Street and the road to Aleksandrovka).

The Babolovsky Palace owes its appearance to Catherine II, who in the spring of 1779, on the banks of an artificial pond formed by damming the Kuzminka River, ordered the construction of a “curious wooden structure” to begin for her favorite Prince Grigory Potemkin. It was also ordered to build the English Garden, surround it with a rampart and a ditch to drain the place. Opposite the palace, on the other side of the river, it was planned to build a residential outbuilding and stables with a carriage house for the palace servants.

Probably the empress liked the idea of this “entertainment complex” far from the Great Court so much that after only a year and a half - in November 1782 - she decided to build a new one, stone, on the site of the old house, with the same set of premises, but with a new marble bathroom .

All rooms had access to the garden. The English garden occupied a small trapezoidal plot, which did not reach the Babolovskaya clearing and was limited in the north by the picturesque coastline of the Babolovsky pond.

Alexander I, as you know, is a big fan of cold bathing, decided to replace the marble bath in the Babolovsky Palace with a bath made of polished granite. The new granite bathtub, hewn from a single block by masters of the St. Petersburg artel of Samson Sukhanov in 1818, was 5.33 meters in diameter, 1.95 meters high and weighed 48 tons. It stood idle for a long time - work on rebuilding the palace began only in 1824.

After 1918, Babolovsky Park was under the jurisdiction of the directorate of palaces-museums and parks of the city of Pushkin (Detskoye Selo), and the palace was given to the military as a school for the 100th Aviation Assault Brigade of the Leningrad Military District.

The Babolovsky Park met the 21st century in such a wild and neglected state that the administration of St. Petersburg did not consider it seditious to transfer more than half of the park for the construction of an aristocratic golf club with accompanying buildings. In 2008, an agreement was concluded with the investor, a beautiful project was prepared, but... as usual, they forgot to ask the residents’ opinion.