The Crowne Plaza is part of Moscow's World Trade Centre. Built in the late 1970s by Armand Hammer, founder of Occidental Petroleum and longtime business collaborator with the Soviet Union, the glass and concrete Centre was one of the earliest manifestations of Western business culture in Russia.
Just across the park from the hotel and the Trade Center stands the Sadko Arcade, notable as one of the first shopping malls to be built in Moscow. Just a few minutes walk to the east of the hotel stands the enormous marble facade and gilded clock of the Russian Government building, or Moscow White House. Recognizable to CNN watchers worldwide as the setting for the dramatic anti-Gorbachev putsch of August 1991, which led to the ultimate toppling of Soviet Power, the White House was again the scene of dramatic events in October 1993 when conflict between President Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament led to a presidential order to shell the White House and its deputies into submission. Just round the bend in the river and a short distance from the Crowne Plaza towers the enormous glass-fronted facade of the Mayor's Office building, which also played a bloody role in the dramatic events of 1993.
Within a five-minute walk of the hotel is the beautiful Vagankov Cemetery, dating from 1771 and almost as prestigious as the Novodevichy Convent's Cemetery. Featuring some beautifully sculptured headstones, the cemetery is resting place to many of Russia's most celebrated names, including the maverick actor, poet and singer Vladimir Vysotsky, whose ironic ballads and gravelly voice have become part of the national consciousness, and the great romantic poet Sergei Yesenin, whose final verse was written in his own blood just before he hanged himself in a hotel room in St. Petersburg.
