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THE CITY HALL SQUARE
Home to gliding and fast-diving pigeons
The Town Is Made of the Mettle of the Citizens was Martin N y rop’s motto
while being in charge of the construction of Copenhagen City Hall. The quality
of the building was meant to correspond to the characteristics of the city’s
population: brisk and dignified, straightforward yet noble, distinguished but not
aristocratic. A house of citizens and city councillors alike, with rooms for staff
and visitors, authorities and ordinary people.
And the new monument of Copenhagen had to be Danish in the details and
Italian in the principal idea as well as medieval in appearance and modern as far
as technology and structure were concerned. T ha t is why there is so much to
look at and observe, marvel at and take pleasure in in Copenhagen City Hall:
mural paintings and glass roofs, offices and weddings rooms, brass taps and
faience tiles.
One hundred years after the newness of everything, the building has not been
forgotten but is still in happy and busy use. Copenhagen City Hall still stands
and can be celebrated as a monumental example of public quality. And the
sound of the chimes of the City Hall Tower does not merely belong to the capital
but since 1925 to the entire nation, being broadcast every single New Year’s Eve
and every day at twelve noon on Danmarks Radio.
Among the pointed towers of the city skyline that of the City Hall is among the
youngest and tallest. And walking under the arch spanning Stutterigade towards
the foot of the new City Hall Tower at the end of Lavendelstrsede, this brick
rocket will tower higher and higher the closer one gets, only to soar sky-high over
Vester Voldgade.
With its unique position the tower heralded a new development of the capital.
The town was allowed to spill over the area of the old earthworks and grow into
a city, and in this western part there were space and possibilities for extension.
There were moats but no transverse harbour entrance, for the shore ran parallel
with the exit road and the railroad to Roskilde, and Tivoli had already occupied
some of the slopes and expanses of water left over from the defence of royal
Copenhagen.
The new City Hall, agreed on in 1888 and inaugurated in 1905, was constructed
in the area of the old ramparts proper, but the open space with flagstones and
tarmac in front of the City Hall was not only tantamount to lively crowds milling
about in the light from electric lighting. The new times of the new century also
created new nervous disorders.
In 1905 G.M. Beard, an American doctor, diagnosed neurasthenia and
American nervousness as diseases caused by modern civilisation. The symptoms
include, among others, headache, swimming eyes, hopelessness and moist hands.
A part of the pathological picture of the neurasthenic can be attributed to a
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