Bellmansgatan and Mariahissen

The iron bridge above Bastugatan leads to the upper portal of the former public elevator Mariahissen. Inside its building, two cars took fifteen passengers each and lifted them twenty-eight meters. The lower entrance stood by Söder Mälarstrand, where people could transfer directly from a steamboat to the elevator and reach the upper streets of Södermalm. Under the same roof as this elevator were offices and warehouses, rented apartments, a gymnasium, and a restaurant.

Before Mariahissen opened, residents of the Dillström Workhouse were brought onto the iron bridge above Bastugatan. At least, that is what a Stockholm legend says. Inspectors needed to make sure that the slender structure could bear a crowd, and the people were ordered to walk across the bridge and rock the deck. Different retellings give different numbers of participants, so this scene remains a legend rather than an established fact.

The Dillström Workhouse was a municipal institution for homeless and unemployed people. Some signed an agreement and lived there until they found work; others were sent there to work off a debt to the poor-relief service. Not all of them could leave of their own free will. These people risked falling along with the bridge whose safety was being tested for future paying passengers. The bridge held.

It was needed by inspector Alban Herlitz. Herlitz lived in Maria Magdalena Parish and worked near Rödbodtorget, on the other shore of Riddarfjärden. The success of Stockholm's first public elevator suggested a business plan to him: connect the steamboat crossing with the upper streets of Södermalm.

In eighteen eighty-four, Herlitz founded Maria Hiss- och Magasins AB. The company bought a plot by Söder Mälarstrand and ordered space to be cut into the rock. Construction cost about three hundred thousand kronor, excluding the cost of the land. Rides began in March eighteen eighty-six.

A steamboat brought people from Mälartorget directly to the lower entrance. Two cars lifted fifteen passengers each twenty-eight meters, and an iron bridge led them above Bastugatan to Bellmansgatan. Mariahissen means “Maria's elevator”: it led to Mariaberget, the height of Maria Magdalena Parish. In the same building, Herlitz rented out premises for apartments, offices, warehouses, a gymnasium, and a restaurant.

The calculation did not pay off. The crossing disappeared, passenger numbers dwindled, and the restaurant closed in nineteen oh eight. In nineteen thirty-seven, public elevator rides also ceased. Offices and workshops continued to occupy the building, but Herlitz's transport route was broken: the lower entrance, the cars, and the bridge ceased to be a single urban route.

The upper portal opens onto a street that had borne the name of Carl Michael Bellman for fifteen years by the time the elevator opened. It was formerly called Björngårdsbrunnsgatan. Bellman, a poet and songwriter about the people of eighteenth-century Stockholm, was born in this block and grew up in another house farther along what is now the street. His Fredman's Epistles made tavern musicians, craftspeople, and visitors to the city's establishments into heroes of Swedish poetry. In eighteen seventy-one, city officials named the street after him precisely because of the houses of his childhood.

Both houses have disappeared. The poet's surname survives on the street sign by the iron bridge along which Mariahissen passengers once left the car for Bellmansgatan.