Aalborg Old City Hall

When Aalborg commissioned master builder Daniel Popp to model its new city hall on Copenhagen’s in 1762, nobody expected the provincial copy to outlast the capital’s original. Thirty-three years later, the Copenhagen Fire of 1795 reduced the model to ruins, transforming Aalborg’s imitation into an accidental archive. For 150 years, just nine staff members ran the entire municipal operation from this yellow baroque building, complete with a courtroom upstairs and a jail on the ground floor where sentences could be enforced immediately.

The jail stayed put until 1860, when Aalborg finally built it a home of its own down the street, freeing up the ground floor for the paperwork of a growing city. By 1912, nine people running the whole administration had become nine people running a fraction of it, and city hall’s clerks packed up for somewhere with room to expand. The building kept working anyway, hosting council meetings until 1970 and, since then, little more than weddings. Denmark’s smallest city hall, relative to the population it once served, now mostly officiates marriages instead of sentences.