Tivoli Gardens

The ground the garden stands on is the flat forefield of Copenhagen's ramparts, on Vestervold near Kalvebod Strand. On the night before 11 February 1659 a Swedish force tried to storm the besieged city across it, the men wearing white cloaks so as not to be seen against the snow and going in through an opening made for the water supply, at the point where Vandkunsten and Stormgade run today. The frozen moat gave them their approach to it, and the defenders met them with showers of stones, beams, boiling water and burning tar. By daybreak the Danes had lost twelve men and the attacking Swedes about six hundred. The white cloaks prompted Copenhageners to say that it was as well the Swedes had brought their own shrouds from home.

Four Swedes reached the parapet. The foremost was cut down with the partisan (a thrusting weapon in common use between about 1400 and 1700) carried by Claus Ahlefeldt, and that weapon is kept at the National Museum; Ahlefeldt was appointed commander-in-chief in Norway in 1660. Although the attackers had to fall back, the siege went on for another half-year, until a Danish-Dutch fleet came to the city's relief. Tivoli's lake is a surviving stretch of the old moat, and it was long said that the ground still holds the bones of the Swedes who fell there.

Georg Carstensen (1812–1857) obtained a five-year charter for the garden by telling King Christian VIII that "when the people are amusing themselves, they do not think about politics". The king granted him the use of roughly 15 acres (61,000 m²) of the fortified glacis outside Vesterport for an annual rent. The gates opened on 15 August 1843. Until the 1850s the garden lay outside the city and could be reached only through the Vesterport.

It opened under the name Tivoli & Vauxhall, the first half alluding to the Jardin de Tivoli in Paris, itself named after Tivoli near Rome, and the second to Vauxhall Gardens in London. The name was changed the same year to Kjøbenhavns Sommer-Tivoli, which stayed the official name until 2004. The undertaking was founded as a joint-stock company, and many of the shareholders were the master craftsmen who had built it. In its first season it offered only two riding attractions, a primitive scenic railway and a merry-go-round, alongside music, theatre, food and drink, stalls and grounds to promenade in, with buildings in the style of an imaginary Orient, band stands, restaurants and cafés and flower gardens. None of Carstensen's original timber buildings survive.

Carstensen said in 1844 that "Tivoli will never, so to speak, be finished", a sentiment echoed just over a century later when Walt Disney said of his own Tivoli-inspired park that it would never be completed. Carstensen directed the garden until 1848, after which the committee, the board, took over its management and elected its own chairman.

The composer Hans Christian Lumbye (1810–1874) was musical director from 1843 to 1872. He took his lead from the Viennese waltz composers, the Strauss family among them, and became known as the "Strauss of the North"; several of his pieces were written for the gardens themselves, including "Salute to the Ticket Holders of Tivoli", "Carnival Joys" and "A Festive Night at Tivoli", and the Tivoli Symphony Orchestra still performs many of them. The Tivoli Youth Guard was founded in 1844, a formation of children in uniforms modelled on those of the Royal Danish Guard, bearskins included, with a corps of drums, a marching band and an honour guard platoon that stands at the garden's buildings and monuments on set occasions.

In 1874 a Chinese-style Pantomimeteatret replaced an older and smaller theatre. It was designed by Vilhelm Dahlerup, also known for the design of the Royal Danish Theatre. From the outset the house was given over to the Italian pantomimes brought to Denmark by Giuseppe Casorti, a tradition out of the commedia dell'arte with its fixed characters of Cassander the old father, his daughter Columbine, her lover Harlequin and the stupid servant Pierrot. Bernhard Olsen was artistic director from 1868 to 1885 and sole director from 1882, followed by Robert Watt from 1886 to 1894, and by Knud Arne Petersen, artistic director from 1899 to 1940.

In 1891 the garden bought a large yellow hot-air balloon, the Montebello, as a new attraction; it was filled with hydrogen and its basket could carry up to fifteen people at a time. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Tivoli also hosted human exhibitions. The wooden roller coaster Rutschebanen, which some call Bjergbanen, the Mountain Coaster, was built in 1914 and is worked by an operator who brakes it so that it does not gain too much speed down the hills. The first bumper cars arrived in 1926.

On 15 August 1943 Tivoli marked its hundredth birthday and set its single-day attendance record, 112,802 people through the gates. In that same year Nazi sympathisers burnt many of the garden's buildings, including the concert hall, to the ground. Temporary buildings went up in their place and the park was working again after a few weeks.

On 25 June 1944 Tivoli was bombed. The German-controlled press put the attack on a Danish resistance group; it was in fact carried out by the Peter Group, a Schalburg unit made up of Danish Nazis, in reprisal for the bombing of a Danish firm that manufactured weapons for the Germans, and most Copenhageners knew as much at the time. Sections of Rutschebanen were among the targets. Officials held that returning the park to working order at once was essential, and the coaster was repaired and reopened twenty-five days later.

The damage elsewhere took far longer to make good. The Glass Hall standing today was put up in 1946 after the destruction of the old one in 1944 under the occupation, while the concert hall's successor was not finished until 1956, seating 1,660; it was renovated in 1985, when the rotunda was added. Kjeld Abell (1901–1961) was artistic director from 1941 to 1950, alongside Victor Lemkow as commercial co-director from 1925 to 1950. Accounts differ over which attack accounted for the original hall: one account dates its burning to the arson of 1943, another to the bombardment of June 1944.

Accusations that the garden was being commercialised in unfitting ways are long-running: in 1991 they moved Martin Zerlang to coin the word "tivolisering", used first in the anthology Kulturliv – en håndbog. In 1992 Tivoli bought its ground outright, the seller being the municipality of Copenhagen. Lars Liebst was managing director from 1996 to 2020, and the heavy development of the garden under him produced sustained argument about its future and its standing as a Danish cultural institution, including the founding of the society Tivolis Venner, which took to the press with its concern that traditional elements of the garden were being replaced by violent rides and new building. Susanne Mørch Koch took over as managing director in 2020.

Ownership sits with Tivoli A/S, listed on the Copenhagen stock exchange, the company having shortened its name from Aktieselskabet Kjøbenhavns Sommer-Tivoli in 2004. Since 2000 the largest shareholders have been Skandinavisk Holding A/S with 31.8 per cent and its parent, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, with a further 25.4 per cent; the remaining shares are spread across some 20,000 holders. Carlsberg sold its stake in 2000 and Danske Bank sold in 2012. A run of court cases has turned on how far the company can stop other traders using the word "Tivoli", which is also an ordinary Danish term for a fairground: in 2005 a suit against Jacobsens Bakery ended in the biscuit maker's favour, and in 2010 Tivoli A/S lost a case against the Norwegian Thomas Tivoli, which was allowed to register its name as a trademark for an amusement park.

The season was for most of the garden's life confined to April through September, but Christmas opening with a market and five extra rides began in 1994, ten days of Halloween opening at the schools' autumn holiday began in 2006 and drew about 500,000 guests, and from 2018 the park added further weeks in October, November, December and February. In 2009 Tivoli acquired its own wind turbine at the Avedøre power station on Avedøre Holme in Hvidovre, among those supplying electricity to the whole garden. Some 320,000 people hold annual passes. Attendance was 2.3 million in 2021 and 4.25 million in 2024, and the garden is the second-oldest operating amusement park in the world after Dyrehavsbakken at nearby Klampenborg.