Freetown Christiania

11:25Josh Clark:And they've had some, like Bob Dylan played there, Metallica and Rage Against the Machine both played there.

11:30Chuck Bryant:So did NoFX, Morrissey, Prodigy.

11:33Josh Clark:Did Morrissey show up, though?

11:35Chuck Bryant:Probably not.

11:36Josh Clark:Yeah.

11:37Chuck Bryant:He was scheduled.

11:38Josh Clark:Yeah.

11:39Chuck Bryant:And I saw Steve Ignorant from Crass played there, too.

11:43Josh Clark:Who's that? I don't know that.

11:45Chuck Bryant:Crass, the punk band Crass. I've never heard of them. Anarchist. Yes, you have. I've talked about them before. I've never heard of them. And I know you listen to everything I say. All right.

11:55Josh Clark:So, Christiana was obviously, I think they had their motto at first, was Black Sheep from All Classes Unite. And they attracted a lot of artists, obviously, early on. And still, the place is kind of teeming with art. If you, you can just look up pictures or you can go on YouTube. And there are quite a few YouTube videos of people just doing like a little walking tour of Freetown Christiania. And it's awesome. It looks like, you know, there's murals everywhere. They started hosting plays and musicals at the Gray Hall. over the years. And it's just sort of a lovely place if you're into art, you know, any kind of visual or musical art.

12:36Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I think I said there were about 800 to 900 residents. I saw about 150 of those are kids. And there are children who are raised, like you said, they've established kindergartens there. And there's a guy named Lucas Forshamer. He's the lead singer of a group, a band called Lucas Graham, and they sing in English. I think they're big-ish. From what I saw, it's kind of pop country almost. He was born and raised in Christiania, and I was reading a Rolling Stone article with him, and it was really interesting, because he seems very mellow and nice and open. But one of his quotes was that he learned how to mix a Molotov cocktail before he learned how to mix a Long Island iced tea.

13:20Josh Clark:Wow, which is interesting, because they generally, I mean, we'll talk about when things got a little violent, but they're a peaceful people.

13:28Chuck Bryant:They are, but they also, you know, the cops show up whenever they want. And this is like a group of anarchist squatters and they don't really like police presences. And yeah, so it's a there's this real undercurrent under this whole story because the there's it's a generally positive story. But you also can't forget we're talking about anarchists squatting in the middle of a modern city and being pressured from outside and pushing back on that pressure in ways that, you know, you can't forget.

13:57Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. So I think we sort of teased a bit of a dark side. And why don't we take a break and we'll talk about another type of person who moved to Christiania right after this.

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16:33All right.

16:33Josh Clark:So we mentioned that lots of like cool, free-spirited artists moved to Christiania and put on plays and musicals and painted walls and did all kinds of fun stuff, opened shops and cafes. But also, that became what was known as the Greenlight District, where even though marijuana was illegal in Denmark, they would sell drugs there, mainly pot, and it was called Pusher Street. The street where they sold the drugs ended up being called Pusher Street. It was generally, like I said, selling weed and hash, not the biggest deal. But anytime you have that kind of thing, you know, somebody will come in wanting heroin or acid or, you know, whatever, you name a drug.

17:15Josh Clark:And harder drugs did kind of come in. And it got pretty out of hand. And they had a lot of problems with the cops and eventually gangs over the years.

17:23Chuck Bryant:Yeah, they did. Because, I mean, marijuana is not recreational marijuana. It was not and I think still is not legal in Denmark. So this is like flagrant open selling of hash in particular. And because this is a black market, the people who are willing to kind of step up and, you know, offer those services or those products are criminal elements. So those gangs in particular, the how are we going to say this? The BS Motorcycle Club? Yeah.

17:54Josh Clark:I mean, everyone knows what that is. We don't cuss on the show, but that's that was one of their names.

17:59Chuck Bryant:And then the world famous Hell's Angels.

18:02Josh Clark:I think you mean the H-E double hockey sticks angels.

18:04Chuck Bryant:That's right. Thank you. They, those two gangs, ended up trying to take over Pusher Street. And there was actually a gang war from 1983 to 1986 between those two gangs. And a lot of it played out on Pusher Street. Now, like you said, the people who live there are pretty much peace loving. They're self-governing. They're just generally mellow people. And all of a sudden there's motorcycle gangs at a war in the middle of your town. And I saw there was an article by I think a guy in Vanity Fair of all places about this. And he said, if you want to imagine Pusher Street, imagine a quaint little small town with a strip mall going right through the middle.

18:55Chuck Bryant:down Main Street with 40 liquor stores on it. Yeah. That's essentially what he said this is like. So this just basically developed. And remember, these people didn't like plan Pusher Street. It just started to happen. And then it got out of hand, certainly out of their hands, because they're anarchists. They can't call the cops because they don't believe in that kind of stuff. They can't stick the government on these people. They don't believe in that kind of stuff. So they had to do whatever they could to kind of try to keep this element out as much as possible. And they really had a hard time with it for decades.

19:26Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, one of the other rules that they eventually brought in was that you can't wear gang colors. I think by 2004, supposedly or reportedly, up to 25 percent of Christiania was reliant on the drug economy. And that same Vanity Fair article said that Pusher Street had the biggest hash market on the planet and said it basically had 40 different stalls selling 40 different brands of hashish. and the cops in 2016 estimated that the drug trade on Pusher Street was worth about$100 million American dollars a year or$1 billion kroner. So it was like that way for decades and decades. There was violence.

20:06Josh Clark:There was at least one killing. I think the cops in 1987 found a dismembered body under the floor of one of the gang's hangouts. And there was just a lot of push and pull over the years with the police trying to rid that scene from there and certainly the people, you know, like most of the people on the inside wanting it gone.

20:27Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I mean, there were, like, there were, I think the Hells Angels eventually overpowered the BS Motorcycle Club to the point where they folded because they kept carrying out broad daylight hits on the BS Motorcycle Club's leaders, and one of those took place at Christiania. As recently as 2023, there was a fatal stabbing, fatal shootings in 2021 and 2022. There was a shooting that injured three people, one of whom was a cop. So you can imagine like if if there are certain liberal vanguards of Danish society there, let them live, let them stay. This is an experience, a social experiment. The cops in Copenhagen hate Christiania and are just, I get the impression, pull their hair out over the idea that this is just allowed to continue, especially when cops start getting shot and other people get murdered in broad daylight in this place.

21:29Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I mean, they had in 1992 like an 18-month campaign to get all the drugs out of there. That didn't work. At one point they were patrolling 24-7. there is in 2004 they had built the cops had built a pusher street replica at their training facility so they could literally train for like exactly how to handle that area and there was a song even the fourth district police department wrote a song about the dealers that had the line clear out christiania take the s down they will never never smoke a joint again that's what happens when cops write songs, by the way.

22:06Chuck Bryant:Right, I know. They also, in 2022 alone, they raided Pusher Street 100 times.

22:15Josh Clark:Yeah.

22:15Chuck Bryant:And they kept bouncing back. It kept bouncing back. I saw that even though they didn't call the police, this was somebody who was explaining it on Quora. I'm not quite sure what their bona fides are. So take this with a grain of salt, but they seem to not be quite sensationalists. They said that at one point the residents of Christiania essentially baited a police raid is how they put it. I'm not quite sure, but they did something that they knew would attract the police. They knew it was coming. And so they warned everybody who lived in Christiania about it. And they didn't warn any of the dealers on Pusher Street to basically use the cops to get these guys out of Pusher Street.

22:56Chuck Bryant:So that's, I guess, one tactic you could possibly use if you're not willing to call the cops. But they also themselves would go disassemble these stalls. They would, as a group, stand up to the Hells Angels in the BS Motorcycle Club and push them out. But even if the cops were doing it, if the residents of Christiania were doing it, it did not matter. For decades, they would come back and they would sell hash and make money and essentially intimidate the people who live there.

23:25Josh Clark:That's right. And they even said, never mind. That was a terrible joke. I'm not even going to say it. But in 2024, they finally, finally, this was just a couple of years ago, dug up Pusher Street. They literally dug up and got rid of that street altogether and got everyone out of there. And they, I think Copenhagen announced plans to build some public housing on where Pusher Street used to be. So, you know, there's like local crafts and stuff being sold on Pusher Street now. It remains to be seen if the drug trade is going to come back. But hopefully that did the trick and it's out of there.

24:00Chuck Bryant:And one of the other things I saw are actually two other things that Christiania residents did over the years to keep drugs out as best they could. The first one, I think, came in the late 70s when heroin started to make a real appearance. And they were like, you know what? We don't want heroin here. We don't want hard drugs. You want to drink. You want to smoke hash. You want to smoke pot. Whatever. That's fine. But we as a group are going to say, we don't want heroin here. So they essentially forced out the heroin dealers and they said, you heroin addicts, if you want to stay, stay. But you have to quit heroin.

24:38Chuck Bryant:You have to go into treatment. And get this. They said, we're going to test your urine randomly to make sure that you're staying clean. And if you're not, we're going to force you out. And I looked into how they did that. And apparently there was a resident who could detect heroin in urine with just one tiny sip. at any rate they really did drug test people um that was the first time they did it the second time they appealed to the public and they said help save christiania buy your hash somewhere else so they were actually actively trying to keep people from buying hash in christiania which apparently is supposedly not actually cool to do but it's such a tourist spot and tourists just will go buy hash whenever they can out in broad daylight, that it was just thriving for decades.

25:30Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, I think they said they get in the peak vacation summertime, they get like as many as 10 ,000 people touristing that area every day.

25:39Chuck Bryant:For sure.

25:40Josh Clark:So it's a very busy area, but it seems like they've eradicated the drugs, at least for now. So their relationship with the government over the years has sort of been up and down, and we'll talk about all that right after this.

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28:03Chuck Bryant:So, Chuck, you were saying that the government has had a love-hate or lenient, not-so-lenient relationship with Christiania over the years, right?

28:14Josh Clark:That's right. How? Well, I mean, you know, they came in and took over a military base. They were building fences and they were getting torn down and sort of like, yeah, you can have a playground. And then, OK, you can live there. And, you know, I think as it started to build, there was just some raised eyebrows, but they weren't causing a lot of trouble. So they let them go. And by 1972, the government's official stance was like, all right, this is a social experiment. Let's see how it goes.

28:43Chuck Bryant:Right. So you think, oh, that's great. They're going to leave us alone. Nope. The next year, the government was saying, like, we're not sure about this social experiment thing. Everybody needs to leave by April 1st, 1976. And the people of Christiania did not take that sitting down. They sued the Danish government. They protested. The courts rule against Christiania over and over again. But despite, you know, legally being able to go in and clear everybody out, the Danish government just would never go that far. They threatened to. They came up with plans. They came up with compromises. But they never went so far as to just go in and remove everybody.

29:23Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, they've threatened eviction and, like, had official eviction decrees and then revoked. But, yeah, like you said, I think it would be – it was so well known by that point, it would be a really bad look for the government to go in and, you know, rip literal families out of there that were basically doing pretty good. I mean, from what I saw, the only kind of downside was the hash trade that went on there for so long, and that was just in one localized area.

29:53Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and that seems to be how the government and the police in particular really kept the heat on the residents of Christiania. Like you said, that seemed to be the only real problem with it. I've seen if you remove that whole drug trade, the crime in Christiania is very, very low. So regardless, because nobody could get a handle on the drug trade in 1989, the government actually passed what they called the Christiania Act. I said, you guys can stay, but you're going to have to work with us a little more. Pub owners are going to have to start getting liquor licenses. We're going to need to certify your kindergarten teachers, stuff like that, right?

30:34Chuck Bryant:Like there had to be some sort of governmental intervention. Their kids have to actually go to government schools outside of Christiania. There was just more involvement that the government insisted on.

30:48Josh Clark:Yeah, a couple of years before that in 1987, they said, all right, the new plan is you can stay here, but we're going to divide up this area. And the neighborhood is going to be rezoned into two areas. The military ramparts where a lot of your homes are is going to be a conservation zone. And you're going to have to move out eventually. And then the second area is what we're going to call the urban zone. And you can basically stay there. And then in a couple of years, they announced all the plans just to make things a little more official.

31:20Chuck Bryant:Right. And it stayed that way for a couple of decades. And then 2001, the government's like, just forget that. Forget it again. We're going to evict you guys.

31:28Josh Clark:So finally, in 2011, the government in Denmark said, all right, you guys can keep doing your thing, but you've got to buy this land. Like, we've got to get something out of it. And that was a tough nut to crack for the residents there. because, first of all, like, they didn't have that kind of dough. And second of all, that was, like, not what they were all about. Like, individual property ownership wasn't their jam. And so a lot of them were turned off by the whole idea of kind of owning that. But then I think they saw the writing on the wall, which is like, well, this is what allows us to stay at least.

32:05Josh Clark:So they raised the money. They didn't, you know, go out and buy individual parcels of land. They set up a foundation that would cover all of the land that they needed. And they raised the dough. They raised 12 and a half million kroner. And that was enough to buy about a quarter of that land and then pay rent for the rest of it.

32:22Chuck Bryant:Yeah, get this. They also took out bank loans, which can't you see them like showing up with like their hair kind of parted and like styled as best as they can. But they're still wearing like their leather vest with the anarchy symbol painted on the back. I mean, that's the movie version. Right. Right. So the way that they got around that private ownership thing was they pooled everything together and they bought it collectively. So Christiania itself owns the land that these people live on. The people pay rent to the community. They also pay essentially a HOA fee of something like 176 kroner, I think, or dollars worth a month.

33:06Josh Clark:Well, 1 ,350 kroner. Well, see, that's the tradeoff is the rent is about$4.67 a month American. Right. But the maintenance fees are$196 a month. So they're basically saying like, hey, you can live here for almost nothing, but it still costs money to run this place and you're all going to pitch in for that.

33:26Chuck Bryant:Exactly. Right. So that's actually a pretty good workaround. If you're an anarchist and you need to make a deal with the capitalist devil, That's about the best you can hope for. So the government was like, well, it's your land now. Okay, we can't do anything. But that's about a quarter of the land. There's still a bunch of land left. And if you don't buy this, we're going to build public housing. That seems to be the threat, ironically, that the government now uses over Christiania, is we're going to build housing that is open to the public, and you're not going to have any say about who moves in.

33:58Chuck Bryant:because over the years, in another great stroke of irony, the people of Christiania have gotten extremely selective of who moves in.

34:11Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, you have to do an interview now to move in. It used to be like they would just accept anybody. But, you know, they got more organized. I think there are 14 different neighborhood groups there now. And, you know, there's a lot of, I think it just got a little more complicated as time went on. Like there has to be consensus for changing even very minor things, like changing out the windows of a building. I think the New York Times did an article on it that said it was like an out-of-control condo association. And, you know, like I said, you have to go through an interview process just to live there now.

34:45Josh Clark:So I think sort of the idyllic days have come and gone. But from what I've read about just contemporary articles now, it seems to still be kind of a great thing for people who live there.

34:58Chuck Bryant:Yeah, for sure. Like there's a sewer system. Like we said, garbage collection has been there a long time. They have recycling centers. They have the Gray Hall. There's cafes, bistros. There's just a lot. There's like a it's a city. It's like a little city that was self-built and also self-governed. They also, Chuck, have their own currency, the lund, L-O-O with a slash through it, the metal O, N, which means the wage. It's apparently equal to about 50 Danish kroner. And it's a minted coin made of copper. I could not find where they have it minted, but they have minted currency in Christiania. There's a pot leaf and a snail on one side.

35:47Nice.

35:48Chuck Bryant:On the other side, it says Freetown of Christiania and live and let others live.

35:54Josh Clark:Wow. That's pretty nice.

35:55Chuck Bryant:But they have minted coins. How?

35:59Josh Clark:You can get a coin minted.

36:02Chuck Bryant:I can't. I have no idea where to go get a coin minted, and I don't even know how to begin to find out.

36:08Josh Clark:We could get a coin minted. There's, like, podcasts and people do, like, challenge coins and stuff all the time. So it's a service you can have.

36:15Chuck Bryant:Well, are my eyes open now? You've never gotten a challenge coin from someone? I don't even know what that means.

36:21Josh Clark:Well, it's like not even, I think there are other names for them too, but you can get like a coin made. Like Ben and Adam, I think, for Greatest Generation had coins made.

36:32Chuck Bryant:Well, they didn't give me one.

36:34Josh Clark:You could give them to people. My brother-in-law in the Marines, they got a coin minted for his, I was about to say graduation, his retirement, And so he gave me one of those coins. So it's a thing.

36:46Chuck Bryant:That's awesome. Will you give me a coin? Sure. I'll just hop on over to coins are us and input my, what do you want?

36:54Josh Clark:I'll have Momo on one side and Yumi on the other. Perfect. And maybe like a palm tree and a Georgia peach.

37:01Chuck Bryant:Can you put them both in profile and make them look like queens?

37:05Josh Clark:Well, they already do. Okay, great. Should be too hard.

37:08Chuck Bryant:That's a great coin, man. Thank you. Let's see. What else? Oh, I talked about how there are only a couple of rules to start, and the first one was violence. The second one was no hard drugs. No hard drugs. As the gangs became more and more of a problem, you couldn't wear gang colors. Yeah. No stealing. No bulletproof vest. That's actually a pretty grim rule.

37:32Josh Clark:Yeah. If you get shot, you're going to die.

37:34Chuck Bryant:Exactly. Take it like a man. And guns and knives, that was all part of one rule.

37:39Josh Clark:And no running.

37:40Chuck Bryant:No running. That's right. Why?

37:43Josh Clark:they said that running causes chaos or panic or something?

37:46Chuck Bryant:Panic, yeah. All right. Yeah, and they were saying that that usually indicates that it's a police raid, and so other people are going to start running too. So don't run, just walk.

37:56Josh Clark:Yeah, lifeguard rules.

37:57Chuck Bryant:Exactly. So the current state of Christiania is exactly the same. They managed to get Pusher Street closed down, or at least they got the pushers out of Pusher Street. that public housing is still on the offing. I think it's supposed to start in 2029. And the neighborhood's very divided about it. Some people are like, no, we want to know who's moving in here. We want to vet who moves in here. And we don't want, you know, 300 public houses built in the middle. I think they were going to build it in the middle, like right down Pusher Street to kind of make it so Pusher Street never comes back. The other faction, I guess, is like, no, this is actually great because we need affordable housing.

38:41Chuck Bryant:Copenhagen is very, very expensive still. So this is going to bring like younger people and artists and allow people to kind of move in. And we need that kind of new blood too.

38:51Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure.

38:53Chuck Bryant:So I talked about different factions, right? There's this author who I think back in 1981, he was a Christiania resident, but also a scholar. And he wrote a book, Burgs Madsen is how I'm going to say his name. And he essentially divided the population of Christiania into three socioeconomic or essentially three cultural strata. One was the top were the activists who he calls the holy ones. The bottom stratum was the he called them trash. And then the middle stratum was the liberalists. and he essentially said that the liberalists came from the middle class outside of christiania moved to christiania and i get the impression we're like the least radical the least anarchistic and he essentially asserts all the way back in 1981 he points to the liberalists as the ones who led to this kind of normalizing compromising of christiania that makes it a little less radical than it originally was.

40:04Josh Clark:I thought you were going to say hash users, hash makers, hash dealers, and hash haters.

40:11Chuck Bryant:And the hash itself. It has rights in Christiania.

40:14Josh Clark:Oh, that's right. That's a group into itself.

40:17Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, that's the future of Christiania. You got anything else?

40:22Josh Clark:I got nothing else. It's on my list to visit if I ever get over that way.

40:26Chuck Bryant:Oh, I can't wait to go to Copenhagen someday. I want to just go to all of Scandinavia. Yeah.

40:32Josh Clark:Oslo.

40:33Chuck Bryant:Oslo. Stockholm.

40:36Josh Clark:Everything I've heard is just great. It's just like if you like nice people just riding their bikes everywhere, then it's for you.

40:42Chuck Bryant:Yeah, for sure. I think Monocle magazine called Copenhagen the world's most livable city.

40:49Josh Clark:Nice. All right.

40:51Chuck Bryant:We'll go there someday, Chuck.

40:52Josh Clark:All right.

40:54Chuck Bryant:And I need to go figure out some other Scandinavian cities to visit, too, so I can rattle them off. That's right. Chuck said that's right, so it's time for listener mail.

41:06Josh Clark:This is from Troy. Hey, guys, been enjoying the show for a few years, and I saw the Camp David episode, and I had to listen right away because my dad was a captain in the Marines and stationed at Camp David from 1971 to 1973. We lived down the hill from the camp in military housing, and when the president, Nixon, at the time was not there, we were generally able to use the facilities on the camp. Everyone that was allowed on the camp or in the camp had their profile with picture in the guard post, and you could drive right up to the gate. At the time, I was five to seven years old and actually learned to swim in that figure eight pool.

41:40Josh Clark:There's a picture out there of Gerald Ford and his dog by the pool at the exact spot I remember just going for it and jumping in. My dad passed away in 2019, and while going through his stuff, I found his short autobiography. I was really surprised at how candidly he described some of this because he never really talked about it that much. Below is an excerpt of his memories there, and he included a really nice page from his dad that I read, and it was awesome. I still have some memorabilia from the time there as well, including Camp David playing cards and a Russian clock given by some dignitaries that visited.

42:16Chuck Bryant:Awesome.

42:17Josh Clark:Keep up the great work, and that is from Troy Buescher.

42:20Chuck Bryant:Well, thanks a lot, Troy. That's a great story. And if you want to be like Troy and tell us a personal story, especially a sweet one about your dad that has to do with one of our episodes, we want to hear from you. Send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

42:38Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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