Oslo stories, Smestad | The bad reputation was undeserved

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That my family has lived in Oslo for generations is really an infiltration. I have to admit that right away.

Mother was born in Smestad in 1929 and did not become an Oslo citizen until 1948, when Aker and Oslo were merged. She was 19 years old. Father was from Bergen. They met while studying at Blindern, got married, and built a house in the apple orchard of their mother’s parents. It was the furthest she moved away from home, and I grew up there.

When you are a child, you like to think that everyone is like you. At least that’s what I thought.

For me, Oslo was a place with detached houses, apple orchards and quiet residential roads, but then we started to explore new and unknown parts of Oslo.

I was probably 14 at the end of the 70s and wanted to see films with an age limit of 16 and 18. The cinemas in the city center were not fooled by our “adjusted” school certificates, so we thought that district cinemas were easier. Thus there were expeditions with the 20 bus to Soria Moria at Torshov, Ringen at Carl Berner and Jarlen at Galgeberg. We got to see movies we weren’t old enough to see. I doubt whether it expanded our Oslo identity in any particular way, but at least we discovered that Oslo was more than Oslo West.

At the time, I had no idea that 26 years later I would be celebrating my 40th birthday in an old stately brick villa on Galgeberg.

At the beginning of my 20s, I moved away from home for real, to Manglerud. There I shared a house with three other friends from Ris high school. Now we lived in subway country. On the west side it was called a tram – I’m not sure if it’s still like that.

This was the start of a longer life in, and discovery of, Oslo’s eastern edge. although the transition from residential areas in Smestad to the same type of housing in Manglerud – Høyenhall to be precise – was initially not that great. This also meant that my mother was forced to go on expeditions to areas of the city she had not been to before. For me, Oslo West became an area I went to for Sunday dinner.

Eventually I met my future wife and moved into her work flat in Romsås. Romsås is part of my Oslo history and my Oslo identity. That the distance from Smestad to Romsås was in many ways great was confirmed when my old great-aunt called and asked “how’s it going on the other side?”.

At Romsås, I started my professional career as a social worker. I remember that the road sign towards Romsås in Grorud was sprayed with the unflattering text “ghetto’n”. I went for a lot of walks in the area with the people I worked for, and I got to know a green district. What looked from the outside like a continuous block area is car-free, and with hiking trails with a forest in the middle. It was also an arena for drug sales, I must admit. Rum sauce was not just land of happiness, but it wasn’t a ghetto either. A funny detail I discovered many years later, at the home of a couple of friends who are architects, was a large picture they had hanging on the wall in the living room of Svartjern and the blocks south of the pond.

To me it was a familiar, old sight. For them, an architectural gem.

In 1990, we were given the opportunity to rent an apartment in Grünerløkka, and thus probably became complicit in the gentrification of the area. Grünerløkka in the 90s was much less groomed than it is now. Fewer hip shops and nightclubs. The smell of Lynol from the dönker milieu at Nybrua was part of the street scene, and the Hersleb bunad – MC jacket, black Levis, basketball shoes and henna-dyed hair for women – characterized the clothing style. It had a big city feel to it.

Two years later we bought our first apartment in Løkka. A three-bedroom with a large kitchen and stucco at a price that today will evoke laughter and horrified looks. It was strange to think that ten years earlier I had gone to the Parkteateret cinema on Olav Ryes plass to see a James Bond cavalcade with the class from Ris high school. At that time, the thought of living on Grünerløkka was quite distant. Back then, Beckers in Markveien, where the pole is now, was still an important watering hole in the area.

I have traveled a lot by public transport in connection with work, and in 1995 the trip went to another district with a fringe reputation. Søndre Nordstrand, to which I commuted by train for 14 years. The bad reputation was again undeserved. I will stay and work here for 14 years. Holmlia is like Romsås, an area with footpaths and green areas, but here there are single-family houses and not blocks of flats. Here I have experienced a solar eclipse and elephants that walked freely and grazed. That was due to a circus that camped overnight.

The daily journey by subway and train to work at Holmlia was a reminder that Oslo is a big city with big differences, both in terms of demographics and economy. When we had a daughter, the apartment on Løkka was not big enough. We needed more space and returned to our roots, to mother and father and the apple garden, in my mother’s childhood home in Smestad.

We were two social workers on a municipal regulation salary in the city’s most prosperous area. It is also an experience. We didn’t exactly raise the average income in the area. The transition from Løkka to Smestad after all these years was great. Eventually the repatriation to villa life went smoothly, although I looked at Smestad with a slightly more outside perspective.

During my adult years at Smestad, I lost both my parents. Father moved into the ground floor with us after mother passed away. When he died eight years later, we thought that there was no longer anything that tied us to the house.

Thus we ended up in our own house in Grefsen. It was also a kind of return for me. It was because of the job at an institution in Kapellveien in the 80s that I was motivated to become a social worker. I would never have thought that 25 years later I would buy a house in that area. I have felt at home at Grefsen from day one. I imagine that it is because it reminds me of Smestad, as I remember it from growing up.

This is how my journey around Oslo has been. A journey in a city that has gone from being a big small town to a small metropolis. I can say with my hand on my heart that I am genuinely happy with all of Oslo – not just parts of it – and there is still much left to see.

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