Last month Līga and I, along with our friend Justine from America, journeyed out to the southern edge of the city to visit Atgāzene, Rīga’s tiniest neighborhood. And when I say tiny, I mean TINY; at just three-fourths of a square kilometer, it’s 25 times smaller than Kleisti (the city’s largest neighborhood), and makes up a puny 0.35% of the city’s area. The neighborhood is shaped like a nearly perfect quadrangle, resembling something like a shard of glass. Vienības gatve (Unity Avenue, the road to Jelgava), Kārļa Ulmaņa gatve (named after Latvia’s pre-WWII president), and the Rīga-Jelgava railroad make for logical boundaries, but the neighborhood is so small and has such few major points of interest that its often included as a part of Ziepniekkalns on websites like ss.lv for simplicity’s sake.

From above, its clear to see that there are two major sections divided from one another by Graudu iela. The slightly larger northern part is almost exclusively residential and made up of smaller houses, whereas the southern part consists mostly of Biznesa Augstskola Turība, a few shopping centers, and the territory of an old sanatorium which now makes up a mixed-use business park.

Justine, Līga and I decided to take advantage of the neighborhood's two train stops, so we boarded a train to Jelgava at Central Station and then got off just two stops later at the “Atgāzene” station less than nine minutes later. I was very excited to finally get off at this stop, as I had passed it by thousands of time on the way to and from work in Jelgava but had never had the opportunity to see this area up close. The original historic wooden station burned down in 2007, and it was replaced by this minimalist “box” station. Thankfully what they rebuilt isn't as gaudy as the shipping container of a station that was put up in Imanta, but it's still a shame that the history was lost. 

We started down the appropriately-named Dzelzceļa iela (Railroad street). Like many of the small roads in this neighborhood, it was unpaved and lined with wooden fences of various colors. The houses here were mostly all two story or shorter, with a few exceptions. The only non-residential building we could see in this part of the neighborhood was a gated kindergarten with a sign that politely asked drivers to close the gate after passing through.

After a short walk we were at Kārļa Ulmaņa gatve, the northern boundary of the neighborhood. Here the four-lane thoroughfare crossed the train tracks via a simple concrete beam bridge. The wide walls underneath had given some local graffiti artists (and simple vandals) the perfect canvas for some artwork, although what we found here wasn't as impressive as that we've seen elsewhere throughout the city.  The three of us walked up the stairs to the bridge and then went out to the middle to get a view of virtually the entire western part of the neighborhood along the train tracks. From here you could also see the towers of Panorama Plaza in nearby Pleskodāle, Rīga's fifth tallest structures.

We now started towards the neighborhood's easternmost edge along Vienības gatve, walking past a historically significant oak tree and a Harley Davidson dealership. All of these thousands of times I had passed by either on the train or bus to or from Jelgava, and I had never known there was a Harley dealership here. The building had some very cool graffiti art on the back, with a “Riders of the Storm” theme in shades of only orange and black. It took only about two minutes to get to Vienības gatve.

Next we took a right and continued down the street a bit until we got to Ģimnastikas iela, where we took a right and walked back towards the station. Before this, we passed an advertisement for Hesburger, Latvia's version of Wendy's, and the headquarters of Tilde, a Latvian translation software company. At the corner of Vienības and Ģimnastikas was one of the country's 126 Fenikss casinos. Although Latvia has very few destination casinos ala Vegas or Atlantic City in the US, there are countless small casinos operated by multi-national chains that can be found in shopping centers, the bottom floors of apartment buildings, and nearly anywhere else imaginable. Although in general I dislike seeing these due to the social problems that I know they aggravate, this one at least had a cool wild west vibe to it compared with the hundreds of soul-crushingly depressing and anonymous ones.

Walking back towards the train tracks down Ģimnastikas iela, we passed what claimed to be the city's best hotel. Knowing nobody who has stayed there I can't confirm nor deny that claim, so if you're looking for a place to stay a night in Rīga you'll have to decide for yourself whether or not to take their word for it. Along the streets were more brick and wooden houses built at various times over the past few hundred years. Although we didn't know until it was too late, we passed by (and unfortunately didn't take a picture of) a house that the legendary Latvian poet couple Rainis and Aspazija lived in for a few years during the 1920s at Dīķa iela 11. We did, however, get a pretty cool shot of one of the new red and silver trains passing by at the end of the street. As we've seen in a few other places, someone took the time to transform an electrical box into a green totem pole using spray paint.

And we were virtually back where we had started. We had now seen the northern third of the neighborhood and had followed roughly this path:

We continued south along the tracks before coming to a small stream that required crossing. It was a bit strange how the stream seemed to intentionally go through this part of Dzelzceļa iela completely uncovered, as I can imagine that after a lot of rain it would be a bit difficult to drive through. As we walked, we got a few more nice train pictures, first an electric passenger one and then a pair of diesel engines hauling freight. 

We now hung left onto Diķa iela, where we passed by Rīgas Igauņu Pamatskola, a primary school opened in 1989 which specializes in Estonian language and culture. At the intersection with Atgāzenes iela there was a traffic mirror to help make the narrow crossroad a bit less dangerous, as well as a small house with a guard dog. I liked his style — unlike a lot of small yippering yappering poodles, he simply just stared at us calmly and silently as if to say, “we both understand that I'm an intimidating rottweiler and that you aren't going to come over here, so let's skip the barking part and keep it at that.” 

We turned down the cobblestone Atgāzenes iela, walking by some more houses before briefly wandering onto the grounds of the Igauņu Pamatskola. We also passed by what seemed to be one of Rīgas Satiksme's (the city's public transit company) offices and another traffic mirror that provided the opportunity for a selfie of sorts. 

Of all the streets in Atgāzene, this was probably the most scenic in terms of the cobblestones and colorful wooden houses. One of the houses had a rare Soviet-era sign with the street name in both Latvian and Russian. It's fitting that the street is named “Atgāzenes iela,” because it really sums up the feel of the entire neighborhood quite well. After a short walk we were back at Vienības gatve.

Back almost exactly where we had turned onto Ģimnastikas iela, we again continued south towards Rīga's city limits. We passed more old brick and wooden houses before coming to a large business park called 87 Vienības gatve, which consists of the old buildings from an 1890s sanatorium. Unfortunately, the gate to the business park was closed since it was a Sunday, otherwise we would have wanted to walk around the park and take some pictures since it looked quite nice. Before the intersection with Graudu iela, we also saw a cool wire frame sculpture of a hand holding a paintbrush outside of a home improvement shop as well as some very colorful bird houses.

On the right side of Graudu iela we passed a discount goods store, a music school, and a floral therapy firm. The left side of the street was dominated by the buildings of Biznesa augstskola Turība, known in English as “Turība University.” This private college is the largest business school in the country, and although it used to have an unfair reputation as a “pay for a degree” type of school, all of my friends who have gone there have told me that they were quite satisfied with their studies. The university even paid for its own infill train station, a great deal for both the school in terms of convenience for students to travel there and for Pasažieru vilciens since aside from the Jelgava, Riga and Olaine stops, its one of the ones the people most consistently use.

Since Ģimnastiskas iela, our route had looked like this:

At this point we were all quite cold and hungry, so we wandered down Bikstu iela to the shopping center anchored by Maxima XX where we found a “Pica Lulu,” one of the city's most popular pizza chains. Of all of the city's pizza options, Lulu is one of my favorites. They do pizza dough very well, but like most places in Latvia, the tomato sauce is far too sweet. In fact, I once got into an argument with my students over whether there was any difference between ketchup and tomato sauce. Sadly, for most of Latvia's tomato sauces there is very little difference (aside from Rundāle, which is the only one I ever buy). I absolutely loved the wallpaper where we were sitting. It's nothing special for pizza places to have stylized urban scenes on the wall, but what I love is that instead of showing Paris or New York or some other cliched global city they have a stylized Soviet block house similar to the ones found all throughout the city (and especially the adjacent neighborhood of Ziepniekkalns). Many people dismiss Soviet block housing as a simple eyesore best to be ignored, so I like how they not only acknowledged it but did something cool and creative with it. Lulu has 24 hour delivery all throughout the city, so if you have a pizza craving at two in the morning you know who to call.

After having eaten and warmed up, we continued down into the final stretch of Atgāzene. Walking back to Vienības gatve, we passed a fireworks shop and a McDonalds before coming to a Rīgas Satiksme client center which seems like also used to be the terminus and turn-around for a trolleybus line. Next to the loop was a large stone marker that used to demarcate the city's border. It was a bit further to Ābolu iela, the current southern border of both Atgāzene and Rīga itself (at least on this side of Vienības gatve).

We turned right onto Ābolu iela (Apple street), the southern boundary of Atgāzene, as well as one of Rīga's borders with the town of Mārupe. Although the left side of the road was technically Mārupe and the right side Rīga, it would be virtually impossible for a casual passer-by to guess that there was a boundary here as both sides look geographically and architecturally identical. At the end of the road, we took a right and started heading back towards the BA Turība train station where we waited just a few minutes before the yellow and blue electric engine rolled up to the platform to take us back home. In that time that we waited, Līga took pictures of some snowdrop flowers that had just barely started to bloom. Despite the grey and cold, there was hope that spring was just around the corner (or at least so we thought).

Our final route had gone like this:

Although it was so small, Atgāzene really did have a different feel to it compared to the surrounding areas with its small houses, dirt roads, and urban feel to it. While nearby Bieriņi and Mārupe also have similarly small houses, they feel much more suburban whereas Atgāzene has this certain sense to it where you really know that you're in the city. That's not to say that it's not a calm and peaceful place by any means, and I imagine that its 1600 or so full-time residents enjoy life there. If you're looking for a low-key and tranquil neighborhood to have a nice walk through, this might be an option: just make sure to take the train.

A few random observations:

Thanks to its minuscule size, I feel that this is the neighborhood that we were able to explore and document in the greatest detail. There were just a few streets that we didn't walk down in entirety, and those that we didn't we were able to see virtually end-to-end from where we were standing. Compared to this, our walk through Kleisti was quite incomplete. It feels a bit presumptuous to say that “I've seen all of Atgāzene” after just one visit, but in this case that might actually be possible. 

For all of the massive neighborhoods in Rīga lacking passenger train service (Purvciems, Bolderāja, Āgenskalns, ect), Atgāzene is almost comically overserved by rail transit. With 2.6 stations per square kilometer (yes, sadly I did the math), I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's the neighborhood with by far the most train stations compared to its size. Better yet for rail commuters, the Rīga-Jelgava line is one of the busiest routes in the country, with trains in either direction at least once an hour and often more depending on the time of day.

The April that came just a few days after this walk was one of the strangest Latvia has ever seen. We had a lot of false starts to spring, followed by bursts of snow (!) at the end of the month. One one hand I feel bad that my Fulbright colleagues (including Justine) probably got a bad impression of Latvia weather-wise this year with a green Christmas and a white Easter, but on the more selfish other hand I've barely had any seasonal allergies this year.

Special thanks to Justine for exploring with us, who was a very good sport despite the cold and cloudy weather!

And that does it for Atgāzene. The next two neighborhoods that we just visited, Beberbeķi and Bieriņi, were done so on warm and sunny days, so the pictures for those will look far less gloomy than Āgenskalns and Atgāzene did. Till next time, let's hope that spring is finally here to stay, and make sure to wish Latvia good luck in the International Ice Hockey Federation World Championships in France and Germany over the next few weeks!