For tourists obsessed with beating the crowds, Covid-19 is a catch-22. With the world’s great attractions empty, it’d be the perfect time to travel, but they’re only empty because a deadly new virus has forced everyone to stay home.
Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to avoid the crowds once the pandemic is over. Like traveling in the off-season. Buying tickets in advance. Or just visiting in the middle of the night when most normal people are sleeping. It’s how David Altrath toured and photographed Stockholm’s surprisingly arty metro last year. “It seemed like I was the only person there,” he says.
Stockholm’s metro—or tunnelbana as the Swedish call it—bills itself as “the world’s longest art exhibition,” and that’s no exaggeration. Since construction began in 1950, some 250 artists have decorated 94 stations across 68 miles of track. (By contrast, the Louvre’s exhibits run 9 miles long.) Many of the stops look like caves a troll might inhabit, their blasted bedrock walls sprayed with a thin layer of concrete, then adorned with intricate murals, reliefs, and even LED sculptures. In the Mörby Centrum Station, a frosted white ceiling and candy-colored tiles conjure childhood visions of the North Pole. In Solna Centrum Station, flaming red walls evoke hell—th
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