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Culturally Protected

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By JOHN HERBERT Hernando Today correspondent

Published: December 16, 2007

Updated: 12/15/2007 12:11 pm

One sure way to feel like an antiqueis to have buildings that you've watched go up in your own lifetime be labeled "culturally-protected landmarks." That happened to me, recently, on a return visit to Stockholm, Sweden, where I spent 35 years of my expatriate career.

One downtown main drag, Harbor Street, bears much of the blame. City planners would have preferred to bulldoze the whole area in favor of another round of "moderization." Citymuseum authorities wouldn't have it; they responded to the modernization threat by culturally designating most of the buildings on the thoroughfare.

In other words, "hands off" a string of buildings not more than 30-40 years old -- banks, department stores, office buildings,restaurants and even a seven-story wing of the Swedish Foreign Ministry where I spent many a Friday afternoon tossing darts with my slightly tipsy journalist colleagues.

Among the spared are the headquarters of a white-collar workers union, Ahlensmodernistic (so we thought) department store,the House of Culture (essentially a four-story reading room), the Swedish National Bank (their version of our Federal Reserve), the City Theater (once home of many home-grown musical comedies), and Parkaden, Sweden's first parking garage.

The once-new construction had originally replaced Stockholm's red-light district, the city's lone Catholic church, and several haberdasheries.

Harbor Street is anchored at one end by a glass fountain, the venerable NK department store (already a protected piece of Swedish history), and at the other end by the rococo Swedish National Theater, where talents the like of Greto Garbo and Ingrid Bergman made their stage debuts, and where cinemagician Ingmar Bergman (no relation to Ingrid) frequently directed.

Across the street from the National Theater, there's a rather nondescript, but balconied, bank buildingwhose underground vault gave birth to the "Stockholm Syndrome."

Two gunmen held female bank tellers hostage for a week back in the early 1970s. Police could hear the robbers and their hostages making hanky-panky friendships with their captives in the vault. The women later defended the bad guys; one of the female hostageseven briefly became a captor's fiance. (Swedish prison sentences are typically brief; armed robbery draws around five years; murder, 12 years max.)

The notorious building has already been converted into a fashionable Italian restaurant and back into a bank in the 35 years since the hostage-taking.

All of the protected Harbor Street buildings are examples of what we'd describe "good, modern architecture." The parking garage is extra special, its facade decorated by concrete latticework. It cost about a dollar an hour to park there 40 years ago; today, it's about $15 a hour. New York rates.

There's a fair amount of optimism in Stockholm that the newish cultural landmarks will actually be saved. "The city usually respects our wishes," says Stockholm's chief historian. "We'll build around what's been protected," adds a Stockholm city councilor.

Herbert writes regularly for Hernando Today. He can be reached at johnaherbert7@bellsouth.net.

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