Between 1751 and 1756 the reconstruction was led by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, and the present look of the palace has not changed much since then. In 1755, the Amber Room was moved from the Winter Palace to the Catherine Palace. The gardens were extended and decorated with sculptures and pavilions. A canal was dug from Vittolovsky Springs (6 km from the Tsarskoye Selo) to provide water for the park ponds, and several stone houses were built on the Perednyaya Street.
The inflow of people to the area in the 1770s urged Catherine II to separate the Tsarskoye Selo from the urban area. By the decree of January 1780 she established a town Sofia nearby with a separate administration. Further construction works without imperial orders were banned in Tsarskoye Selo and most merchants and clergy were moved to Sofia. The town was divided into rectangular districts with a vast open place in the center. A wooden church of Saints Constantine and Helen and then the stone Sophia Cathedral (1788) were raised in the town center. According to Johann Gottlieb Georgi, in 1794, Sofia was mostly populated by the palace workers and peasants. It had a number of stone buildings, a church resembling Hagia Sophia of Constantinople, and a factory in the suburbs producing paper for state bank notes. The town prospered owing to the proximity of St. Petersburg and imperial attention.
Nicholas II meets deputies after the consecration of the Fyodor Cathedral (1912).
A new park which later became Alexander Park was established in the 1770s to the west of the Catherine Palace, and in 1792�1795 Giacomo Quarenghi built the Alexander Palace at the north-eastern border of the park for the future emperor Alexander I. In 1808, Alexander I merged the Tsarskoye Selo with Sofia and proclaimed it a town and administrative center of TsarskoselskyUyezd. In 1808 he appointed William Heste as the town architect, which post he held until his death in 1832. Heste compiled a master plan for
