The first public park in Nizhny Novgorod dates back to 1835. It was named after Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, the wife of Emperor Nicholas I. This is an intimate space in the city center, a small retreat for a quiet stroll with stunning views. The place has an unusual topography, sitting right on the slopes above the Volga, where Maxim Gorky, Feodor Chaliapin and Pavel Melnikov (alias Andrey Pechersky) loved to go for walks.

The famous Rakushka, an open-air concert platform with an orchestra shell (hence the name in Russian), which had been the venue for many music festivals and concerts since the late 1950s, was restored in 2021, the year of the 800th anniversary of Nizhny Novgorod. There was a summer when more than 50 concerts were held on this stage (a scale unheard of even in Moscow), and during the closing ceremony of the Contemporary Music Festival in 1962, Dmitri Shostakovich, a prominent Russian Soviet composer, said that 'Moscow had temporarily become a musical suburb of Gorky.'