Katarina Elevator

This guide to the Katarina Elevator in Stockholm opens in 2010, when an insurance engineer and the lift's own contractor both declared the steel tower beyond saving after decades of steam-then-electric service dating back to its first version in 1883. It traces how the structure standing over you now, raised in 1936 after the original wore out, spent thirteen years doing nothing while engineers argued over whether fixing it made any sense at all. In its opening month back in 1883, about fifteen hundred people a day paid a few öre just to skip the hill.