Street of the Horn

Hot on the heels of my paean to the Stockholm Sluice, here's something about the Hornsgatan street in Stockholm. Be warned, though: this work has been deemed substandard by the Swedish editor of Vice Magazine.

HORNSGATAN
By Martin Rundkvist, 19 March 2007

Hornsgatan, the Street of the Horn, used to be Stockholm's Wild West. It starts sedately enough at the 17th century South Town Hall but then ploughs straight through the churchyard of St. Mary, the bones of poets and burghers flying. Gathering speed, it passes Marijuana Square (as St. Mary's square was known in the 70s) and shoots off west through post-war housing estates toward the Toll Gate of the Horn. It's straight, it's noisy and it stinks.

Stockholm's a pretty clean place in that typical Scandinavian way. No coal furnaces, the cars are largely new, and high wages have scared off most of the heavy industry from the area. So if you want lung cancer and don't like smoking, there are few places to go. Hornsgatan is actually your best bet, offering what may be the worst air in all of Sweden. That's where you will find appreciable amounts of car exhaust and airborne particles torn from the surface of the street. Early spring is the funkiest period, when sand strewn over the icy asphalt during the winter is everywhere, and drivers haven't had time yet to switch from winter tyres studded with steel.

Take a deep breath. Hold it. Feel the silicate and methylbenzene mist settle in your chest. Yeah, it's a city all right.

Talking to the locals, I find that pretty much everyone knows about the bad air, but nobody worries about it. Sam the Friendly Ethiopian Barista shrugs and says, "The air may be bad by Swedish standards, but hey, I grew up in Addis Ababa and Los Angeles, so I've seen much worse". Regular customer Vickan agrees, she was a city girl herself and now she's raising two children at Hornsgatan. Sam's espresso place is way out west, and most of the neighbouring establishments seem to cater to old folks. There's the health food store advertising herbal menopause remedies, a fishing-gear place, dry cleaners, realtors, non-hip hairdressers and dusty clothing boutiques, and to make your septuagenarian shopping experience complete, an undertakers'. But a change is coming on. The espresso bar opened a year ago, and young people are moving in to replace tenants who breathed the air of Hornsgatan for too long and made the final trip to the undertakers. But the barista doesn't want to see his street too commercialised. That way Starbucks lies.

To many, Hornsgatan is synonymous with the Hump's art galleries. Before the traffic channel was blasted through St. Mary's churchyard, the street crested a small hill outside the churchyard wall. The Hump is still there, but instead of the wall, there's a balustrade and a 25-foot drop. On the untouched side of the Hump, the galleries. Artist friends tell me that displaying your work on the Hump is a career choice amounting to an admission of scaled-down pretentions. The Hump galleries sell paintings and prints affordably to middle-class suburbanites. Once you've taken that path, you can never hope to make your bread by selling three insanely expensive pieces a year to collectors in Manhattan.

Gangly serious Sara is in high school, and she doesn't care either about the bad air. No wonder: she's busy smoking a cigarette when I talk to her. Hornsgatan's tentative drift toward hip has registered here too: she tells me it's the place to go for cool second-hand sunglasses. Sara would love to live in the area. She and her friends hang out on summer evenings on the Skinnarviken cliffs where the view is to die for. And after the high-schoolers go home, the little death is sought and found in this, one of the city's traditional gay cruising areas.

Incongruously, I find a huge bicycle store on the most polluted street in the city. The windows are full of indoor bikes. I wonder what the net effect on your health will be if you lug an indoor bike up to your apartment on Hornsgatan and pedal it evening after evening with a window ajar to let in the exhaust fumes. I'd prefer to buy a bike that will actually take me out of the city.

[More blog entries about , , ; , , .]

More like this

I just finished reading Nils Ahnlund's 1953 history of Stockholm up to 1523, which marks the end of the Middle Ages in Swedish historiography. Its 538 pages of text offer less concrete detail than an archaeologist might wish for, and I soon lost track of everybody named Anders Jönsson and Jöns…
My blog has so far landed me one paid writing assignment, and today I got a copy of the mag where it was published. Sort of. Vice Magazine is a wannabe-controversial fashion mag. Its June issue has a glue-huffing teen boy on the cover and there are web-cam boob pics inside. You get the picture.…
Town life in Sweden started small in the later 8th century with Birka. The country's capital, Stockholm, is a late town by Swedish standards, having been founded only in the mid-13th century. One of the oldest extant buildings there is the great church beside the royal castle, Storkyrkan. Here,…
Tree-house ruin near the old chapel cemetery on Skogsö. Fear me! I make bad puns in really, really bad Mandarin! One Celsius and sleet. I have to drive for four hours today, so I'm switching tyres first. Skänninge is dying. So many empty shop premises and housing properties. Facades flaking.…

One reason I know Chateau Mouton-Rothschild is overrated is that my local McDonalds refuses to stock it.

In Swedish, it's traningscykel. I don't know what the British English word is. It's a stationary machine with a handle bar and pedals, only when you pedal it you don't actually go anywhere. Sort of a home gym thing.

I was descending the steps from the Hump the other day and suddenly noticed that somebody has added tiny bronze sculptures to the stone wall. I hope they are too insignificant to get stolen, they made my day when I suddenly saw them.

Personally, my favorite reason to visit Hornsgatan is the restaurant and bar Akkurat. Its location, between the Hump and the Sluice just where all the traffic emerges out of the tunnel under Södermalm, makes their outdoor tables are the perfect place for those who, like Martin, think exhaust fumes are a nice complement to a meal and a drink.

If that isn't your poison, the real reasons for going here are found indoors as well: a very large selection of brews of all kinds from everywhere, an equally astounding array of whiskies, and above all, the best moules frites in town!

I can feel my thirst building for Tuesdays blogmeet already!

In England an indoor bike such as you describe would be called an exercise bike. As to the rest, I can only offer the words of Dævid Allen -

You can look for a place
But space is rare
Better take up smoking
'Cos there ain't no air

That was New York City but who's counting? :-)

BTW, I presume you are entitled to poetic license, but surely the Horn Hornsgatan is named for is one of the counts Horn?

If i remember correctly,
the Swedish version of the the "best-selling commercial board game in the world", Monopoly, has the street Horngatan among the ones with the absolute lowest fee/rent.

But nowadays, it seems as one of the popular ones.

but surely the Horn Hornsgatan is named for is one of the counts Horn?

I thought so too (for example the admiral Klas Horn), but inspired by Martin's article, I did some searching around, and it seems we may have been too quick to asssume this.

According to this very informative article, the street actually got its name from the place name Horn, referring to the westernmost tip of Ãsön, the island the street is on. As a place name, Horn is documented from 1422. The noble family Horn, however, didn't establish itself in Sweden (from current Finland) until the 16th century.

BTW: although Akkurat is a great place to go for an evening out, it is often difficult to get a good place to sit for a larger group without a reservation for everybody arriving at the same time. Hence, despite the great assortment of brews and chow, it might not be the ideal place for a blogmeet...

Åsön - gaah!

Any hints on how to write Scandinavian characters so they are shown properly...?

In the name of the FSM - how come it worked now? Does the preview function convert the characters somehow? (I didnät use it in my latest comment...)

Scandy characters work strangely and unpredictably in comments. Often I have to edit in real HTML code into your comments afterwards (yes, I can make you guys say anything I like). This time, I did not!

The reason that Vice didn't want to publish it must've been that you didn't used the F-word in every sentence, because it's a good article.