Nikolaj Art Gallery

This guide to the Nikolaj Art Gallery in Copenhagen opens on a June afternoon in 1795, when Copenhagen's firefighters reached the pumping station behind the church and found the door locked. It follows the fire that swallowed Saint Nicholas Church and much of the surrounding quarter, and the tower's strange second life afterward as a lookout, a butcher's market, and a harbor clock. An artist's idea for lending art like library books eventually turned this former church into a home for the disobedient and new.