We were invited to "Halmbal." The city administrators printed and distributed full-color posters and a booklet to bring us outdoors into the "torv" (square). Free red meat, draft øl (beer) for 2 crowns a pint, activities for our children (ceiling-high, untied haystacks sitting on concrete to play on . . . our children are apparently incapable of falling off and breaking bones), and a "ceremony" to mark the end (or loss, depending on your feelings) of the "old" square.
Goodbye to the WWII bunkers at the apex of the square on this end of the mile-long boulevard; or, more accurately, farewell to our thick stand of trees which covered the bunker platform. The beautiful stand of flowering trees, white and pink, have harbored not only the junkies but a half dozen large nests of songbirds that have kept this spot from being nothing more than a drug-dealers' paradise. The trees have made this sad place, with its human waste, bearable. Only nature can do such a thing amidst such self-inflicted decay.
At first it seemed like a fun event. We found a table and friends to share it with . . . four parents, four children. But once the lines began to form for the free food, the atmosphere began to change.
I was at the beginning of one line. It took an hour to receive a plate of food. The line stretched across the plaza, over the street and up the side of the forbidding Police Station #1. We were lucky to be at the front. Then the local street people and the habitual barstool occupants ventured into the party, searching for left-over food and dropping bottles of beer at our feet. More and more young people from outside the area, arriving in the ironically fashionable "rick-shaws," were filling the space and filling up on cheap beer.
At 9 p.m. the lights went on. Colored lanterns around the square felt like a lame imitation of a scene from a Fellini movie. Then came an explosion of white light from enormous floodlights bathing the bunkers. Suddenly, a roar reached us at the back of the crowd and we looked up. A big, growling machine was ripping the trees out of the ground by their roots. Police were lined up in front of the bunkers should anyone be motivated to get too close, for any reason. Small children were frighted and some were crying in the midst of this short but violent event. When it was over, fifteen minutes later, I climbed up my stairs and cried when I looked down from my window at the mess. I watched male after male climb up on the naked bunker's crest to pee fresh beer on the dead pink- and white-flowered trees.
This was the so-called "ceremony" to which we were invited — a summary execution of the trees, no mercy for them and no chance for anyone in this neigborhood to object to their loss in the sober light of day.
Silly me, I should have thought the trees would be taken down with the same care and respect that all the trees afflicted with Dutch Elm disease had been taken down throughout Copenhagen. I remembered the huge, ancient trees in Enghave Park. They were sick. They had to be chopped down. The park is utterly charmless without them, but it had to be done. It took many weeks to carefully cut them down. In fact, trees all over town have had to be destroyed. But none have been ripped out of the ground with bulldozers as a kind of orgy/spectacle for thousands of øl-drinking party animals.
This is the state of Danish politics. And it is not just about manipulating a public for which there seems little apparent respect. Most pathetically and bizarrely, this is about solving the neighborhood's relentless decadence: hard drugs, prostitution, and chronic alcohol abuse. Apparently the policy makers, designers and planners in the public-works department think that attractively asymmetrical architectural conceits are going to fix these things for us.
So I have to ask: How come this urban renewal hasn't done a blessed thing to "fix" the human problems yet? While the streets and buildings and backyards have been ripped apart over these past eight years, where did the junkies and dealers go? They went indoors. My indoors. In my attic and stairwells. On my front stoop, in my back yard. Will destroying the trees and the bunker change this situation? The politicians in charge say it will.
I doubt that the brothel- and barkeepers, the drug dealers, their clients, their employees and their employees' "friends" are in any danger of being displaced. In fact, the city fathers may have unwittingly delivered to the neigborhood a better, more affluent class of consumers to meet the costs of any rent increases resulting from this massive urban renewal. But all this renovation is making it unviable for families like ours to afford to move here. And it makes the place hostile to the local residents in new ways, but in ways not anticipated by the urban planners and designers.
By the way, Mr. Mayor, the junkies were back the morning following the "Halmbal" — under the full cover of crushed trees, shooting up as normal (except now there were no longer any needle-disposal boxes for them to use compliantly). Incidentally, what island is the city planning to send our junkies and whores to? I mean the ones who don't pay rent or don't have subsidized incomes.
Meanwhile, I'm wondering where next to move. Maybe a place with trees and politicians with brains. Or not.
Postscript: April 12, 2004
The new plaza in front of my house is now finished. The spare, chic place has a giant flint rock in the central passage area. This makes it a surreal landscape since it inhibits the flow of traffic; a public space that has no pedestrian purpose as a result. The areas flanking the rock, with three very shallow, narrow belgian-block steps graded up to the patches of landscaped green, are rather picturesque. Yellow tulips (only yellow) are blooming in a haphazard array of clumps around strategically placed, still leafless bushes. A broad flat plank bench faces the street on either end of the public causeway, with the rock filling up the middle.
As I write this, six people are sitting on these two benches. But wait. Now some young people have just turned up and taken perches on the narrow shelf of stone steps and the granite perimeter-wall ledges. It is a bright, warm, sunny spring day, a national holiday. I count 24 people, including one baby, clinging to the hard edges of the space. No one dares sit on the flat, slightly tilted top of the big rock, despite its southern exposure. Everyone — and I mean everyone, all the time — stays off the grass. No signs to that effect are out there either. Only dog-walkers let the grass get trodden upon, though only by their bursting pets.
Across the traffic circle, on the north sidewalk under yellow awnings, three posh outdoor cafés are packed with trendies. But the rest of this grand, 150-year-old-plus urban space, "Halmtorvet" is utterly empty. Gray concrete stretches out into the middle distance toward the city's southwestern escape route — a windy, stark, sterile open space where junkies can't stay. Or anyone else, for that matter. It's all just for looking at, apparently — for contemplating — in an uniquely Danish existentialist exercise conducted from a comfortable, sheltered distance while sipping what is probably the world's best beer.
About 30 minutes have passed since I last looked out the window. I look again to see that only six people now remain in the plaza. It's like a fast-food restaurant out there. How does that work?
And the junkies continue to use my front stoop to do their business. Bloodstains splattered on the doorstep are frequent. It's still home to them too. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
