Norra Smedjegatan (2023)

Norra Smedjegatan was a street in the old city center of Stockholm, cobblestoned and lined with buildings constructed through the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, with some buildings being added in the early twentieth century. It was a backstreet, perched upon a hill that once prominently rose through this part of the city. The street was tucked between the Brunkeberg square, once a traffic hub and a cultural and financial centre of Stockholm, and Regeringsgatan, one of the main streets of the city in its time. Along Norra Smedjegatan lay the old catholic church, as well as the pioneering telephone building dating back to the eighteen-eighties, with it’s landmark telephone tower, a large oddly square-formed, black metal construction that in the early days of telephone infrastructure connected all of the city’s telephone lines through the air. This tower rose high, was visible far and wide and became a landmark of modernity in this city that so wished to be a part of the progressive movements of Europe. When active, hissing sounds of voices could be heard from the lines throughout the city when they were transmitted to and from the tower. The building itself had large halls where young unmarried women manually connected incoming calls using meter-high, wall-covering switchboards. At its peak at the turn of the twentieth century, Stockholm was the city with the the largest percentage of telephone lines per capita in the world.

Norra Smedjegatan was also famous for it’s many short-stay hotels, an euphemism for brothels where, in the shadows of this alley a little ways aside from the buzzling city life, women selling sex took their costumers. Several craftsmen and florists also had their shops at this street, thus sharing it with prostitutes and catholic nuns.

For a long time, the street was regarded as decayed, and was doomed to destruction due to long-standing ambitions of urban redevelopment, that for various reasons were postponed until the middle of the twentieth century. During the last decades of its existence, owing to a reluctance to maintain the buildings, the street became run-down and a place were bohemians and down-and-out people lived, while the old city center of Stockholm around them was completely demolished and reconstructed into a downtown area following the American model. After many years of being a vast construction site, the formerly dense, irregular quarters were replaced with large bank palaces, parking garages and office buildings. As a last step in this process, Norra Smedjegatan was torn down at the end of the nineteen-sixties. On the enormous lot, for a long time left empty, a shopping mall was finally built in the seventies. The demolition of the street was an important event in a change of mentality of the citizens of Stockholm towards the urban redevelopment, who then-after started to protest against the massive destruction of the old city center. A few years later the redevelopment program halted. Norra Smedjegatan was completely wiped out and is sometimes referred to as ‘the street that disappeared’. Even the hill upon which it climbed was blown away. Nothing now remains of that which was once a central part of the veins of the city.

I grew up in Stockholm, on a hill on an island overlooking the city center. From early on in my life I have been obsessed with the history of this part of the town. I often walk the streets that remain in the city center and try to reimagine what they would have looked like before everything changed. This nostalgia surely can be seen as indicative of something else, a projection of some other loss. Still it haunts me. I look at paintings by Eugene Jansson, a Swedish painter of homoerotic scenes of military men, but also views of Stockholm overlooking the city from long before its reconstruction. Jansson lived and painted in the streets where I grew up. What he saw I saw too as a teenager, as I ran out almost every evening, walking around all night, alone in the city. I see in his paintings the same pale, intense blue and red light rising with the dawn over the city that still so does today. This light that he saw comforts me, it makes me feel at home, it is the light of my childhood.