A new general plan was hastily developed by July 1949. The city was divided into four zones: central, northern, eastern, and southwestern. Reconstruction of the city began in that year. Thus from the early 1950s through 1991 Ashgabat's skyline was dominated by the Brutalist Style favored by post-Stalin Soviet architects. The city's central avenue, Magtymguly (former Kuropatkin, Freedom, and Stalin Prospect) featured "monotonous and primarily two-story construction of administrative and residential buildings." This reconstruction "preserved the existing network of city streets as it was economically unjustified to redesign them." The city was described as "...a Communist-era backwater, rebuilt into a typically drab provincial Soviet city..."