The Duc and the beginning of Old Odessa

If Jose De Ribas (who has a street named in his honor: Deribasovskaya street) is considered the Father of Odessa, then the Duc De Richelieu could maybe be named a very close uncle.

Despite the economic boom that De Ribas had seen during his stint as the city administrator, Odessa still lacked many public buildings and works.  Despite its cosmopolitan reputation, many people were surprised to see, when they came upon Odessa, that it was still very much a frontier town.

The Duc, who's father was a famous cardinal in France, had helped him originally get a job and title in the court of Louis XVI, famously known to have become headless after the French Revolution.  Richelieu had been close with the king and his family, and had originally begged them to leave France for someplace safer.

So, afterwards, basically blacklisted in the rest of western Europe because of close ties to the French former Royal family, like may other European statesmen, headed eastward into Russia's frontier to find a job.

He was appointed the new administrator to Odessa, and immediately set about building schools, the library, government buildings, the sewers (which in the future present a problem, as do the tunnels created by mining limestone for buildings from underneath the city-- they were used by partisan rebel groups in WW2... but we aren't quite there yet.), transforming the frontier town into an urban center in time that Peter the Great would be proud of.

De Ribas' organization of Odessa, drawn with the help of Dutch designer Franz De Voland.  With Richelieu's improvements, later Mark Twain would visit the city and claim when he looked around that all he saw on all sides was America-- the block organization of the city closely resembled Washington, D.C.

With that, the transformation from a tatar village to frontier boomtown to a city to rival the capital of the United States was complete.  Odessa may have been owned by the Russian Empire, but it was far from russian.  Odessa had been Tatar, then conceived by a Neapolitan mercenary, named by a German on the Russian throne, organized by a Dutchman, built by Richelieu and his exiled French noblemen, and modernized by a Russian count who wished to be British (we'll get to him soon enough).  There was nothing 'Russian' about Odessa... perhaps that is why it developed such a unique reputation, memorialized in Russian literary and pop culture myth as "Old Odessa".

King, Charles. Odessa: Genius And Death In A City Of Dreams. New York: W.W.
     Norton & Company, Inc., 2011. N. pag. Amazon Kindle. Web. 4 Apr. 2012. 

Photo from: http://www.odessos.com/pics.htm