Until the late 19th century, the harbour south of what is now Langebro was a wide bay.
In the middle of the 19th century a new railway from Copenhagen to Roskilde was laid out along the north beach of the bay, along what is now Sønder Boulevard. In commercial terms, the close proximity of water and railways is catnip for development … as much back then in the 19th century as it is now.
First a meat market and gas works were built out into the bay with wharves for the delivery of coal for both the gas works and then for a new electricity works built immediately south of Tivoli. That was superseded in 1932, when the coal-fired power station of HC Ørstedværket opened.
There were wood yards between the harbour and Ny Glyptotek when it was built in the 1890s but these were rapidly replaced with new streets and apartment buildings.
A new central railway station was built in 1911 and the railway was taken out on a wider curve on yet more land claimed from the bay and, for the first time, Bernstorffsgade, between the new station and Tivoli, became a main road though, initially, it did not continue much further than the south-west corner of Tivoli and certainly not as far as the harbour.
At about the same time, so from about 1890, the line of the shore of Amager, opposite, was also being pushed further and further out into the bay and both sides of the approach to Langebro became docks.
If you use the word port it usually conjurers up the image of ocean-going liners but this was docks .... vital, hard working but fairly grubby commercial quays for coal, grain, sand and building materials and soy beans and sugar. The sort of goods carried in freighters.
On the city side, these commercial docks continued all the way up to Knipplesbro so across where the National Library and BLOX are now.
Rail tracks came off the outside curve of the main railway and ran all the way up the city side as far as Nyhavn and at Langebro the railway crossed over to Amager and ran down quays on the Islands Brygge side … all for goods and not for passengers.
The area where Kalvebod Brygge is now was mainly rail sidings and marshalling yards and, although it might seem incredible now, this was where, around 1969, the city built the first container port. The main area for transferring containers from ships to railway trucks - then a very new system for shipping goods - was on new yards where the service depot of the metro is now.
There were soon huge new cranes along the quay for transferring containers but it was early days for this new form of shipping and there are accounts of early attempts to pick up and move containers with a fork-lift truck on each side in, what sounds like, a dangerous balancing act or containers were lifted up from the end which blocked the driver’s view of where he was going and it can’t have been that good for the cargo to have the container tipped up at an angle.
There was still a large building of circa 1910 that had been a pig market on the quayside although it had been used as a garage for some time. It was demolished in 1966 and work started on extending Bernstorffsgade down across the site of the market as far as the quay and then a main road, a dual carriageway, was constructed along the quay - and that is what is now Kalvebod Brygge - to be the main fast route into and out of the city.
This was part of wider plans to modernise radically the road system of the old city with wide and fast new roads. It was the period when there were even plans to build a motorway down the lakes as an inner ring road and the period when large blocks of old buildings in the north corner of the old city were demolished and the first glass and steel office buildings were constructed within the old defences.
But events and world economics and technology were moving faster than the plans and the dock was in decline. Not least, the problem was that the docks had to deal with larger and larger ships and these would all have meant the raising of Knipplesbro and Langebro and the opening of the rail bridge at Langebro to let them through. The docks in the south harbour went into decline and the focus turned to large new facilities at Nordhavn and on the expansion of other ports in Denmark
If the office buildings along Kalvebod Brygge can be criticised, it is because they are uninspiring and waste an amazing location but, by the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the city was facing bankruptcy and a new business area and any way to revitalise the harbour was better than any alternative. Award-winning architecture was not a priority.
