Now And Then: Pits Of Despair

Cities need wastelands

Walk along the harbour road at Geirsgata today, and you’ll be greeted by something relatively novel in the history of Iceland: an immaculately modern, clean, pedestrianised new district that wouldn’t look out of place in Copenhagen. There’s shops like Mountain Warehouse and COS, fancy offices, luxury apartments, plus some tourist-friendly ‘experiences’ like a VR tour of Iceland. This new neighbourhood is set on either side of Geirsgata, and stretches from Bæjarins Beztu all the way to Harpa.

This modern development belies a dirty little secret, however. One so shameful that, like Joseph Stalin with his protege Nikolai Yezhov, the powers that be had no choice but to doctor all evidence of its existence and scour it from the history books. I’m talking about the pits.

You may ask: what were the pits? A tricky question. Much that once was is now lost, for none now live who remember it. That’s because they want us to forget. But Reykvíkingar will never forget. How could you forget two massive holes in the ground, boundless and bare, filled with nothing but dirt and rubble, stretching as far as the eye could see? Fenced off from the world, these vast expanses of wasteland were once all that stood between the hot dog stand, the opera house, Mt Esja, and the great beyond.

The first pit (Pit #1) stood on the current site of COS and the other buildings that now back onto Lækjartorg. Before this pit, there was a car park. I know because I saw it with my own eyes back in 2013 on my first trip to Iceland. Shortly after that visit, the car park was demolished to make way for the pit. But if you look online or on Google Maps for evidence, the only photography that exists of this location is in 2013 and after 2020: pre-pit, post-pit, and nothing in-between.

Then, there was Pit #2. This second, much larger pit, stretched all the way to Harpa from the crossing of Geirsgata. Pit #2 was suffused with mystery. Built in the 2000s and left to rot in the wake of the financial crash, it had a dark, swirling liminality to it. If you were to walk to Harpa from downtown Reykjavik, you had no choice but to trace its poorly lit frontiers and hope whatever lay in the darkness wouldn’t come for you.

The pits were there for years which, by any measure, is a really long time. They were there for so long that they were a sort of blank canvas for the hopes and dreams of this city — a place where you could weave rich fantasies about the life of the world to come. Nobody knew what the pits were for, or what they would ultimately end up being. Really, it seemed like they would never be anything but pits. Walking by, you could imagine a new skatepark… a bowling alley… a restaurant — anything your heart desired. The pits were filled with stony possibility; they were a home for lost futures.

Today, the pits are gone, cleansed by the hungry flames of progress, commerce, modernisation. Their disappearance is a testament to a deep intolerance that has set into western culture: the refusal of any and all ambiguity. No longer can cities be permitted to co-exist with the untamed, the unknowable. There can be no unfinished details, no unrefined ore, no uncertainty, no empty pits. That’s why they had to go. But cities need their wastelands to remind them; not only of what came before, but of what could’ve been. In this way, Reykjavík’s pits were really a testament to the sublime ineffability of the whole cosmos — of Man’s reckoning with the endless cold expanse of the universe.

Anyway, all the magic in the world is dead now, and instead we finally got an H&M. YAY!