Kluuvi (; ) is the commercial centre of

Helsinki Helsinki () is the Capital city, capital and most populous List of cities and towns in Finland, city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About people live in the municipali ...

Finland Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...

, and a

neighbourhood A neighbourhood (Commonwealth English) or neighborhood (American English) is a geographically localized community within a larger town, city, suburb or rural area, sometimes consisting of a single street and the buildings lining it. Neighbourh ...

in the Vironniemi

district A district is a type of administrative division that in some countries is managed by the local government. Across the world, areas known as "districts" vary greatly in size, spanning regions or county, counties, several municipality, municip ...

of Helsinki. The

Helsinki Central railway station Helsinki Central Station (, ) (List of IATA-indexed railway stations, HEC) is the main station for commuter rail and long-distance trains departing from Helsinki, Finland. About 200,000 people "pass through the station" every day, half of whom ar ...

, Hotel Kämp and Hotel Arthur, the Helsinki main post office, the

Stockmann Stockmann plc is a Finnish retailer established in 1862. Stockmann's eight company-owned department stores are in Finland (six), Estonia (one), and Latvia (one). There also were an additional nine Stockmann-branded department stores in Russia ...

and Sokos

department store A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store under one roof, each area ("department") specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, the department store mad ...

s, the Kluuvi shopping centre and the main offices of Finnish banks are located in Kluuvi. Kluuvi includes the central campus of the

University of Helsinki The University of Helsinki (, ; UH) is a public university in Helsinki, Finland. The university was founded in Turku in 1640 as the Royal Academy of Åbo under the Swedish Empire, and moved to Helsinki in 1828 under the sponsorship of Alexander ...

, the Ateneum art museum, and the

movie theatre A movie theater (American English) or cinema (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English), also known as a movie house, cinema hall, picture house, picture theater, the movies, the pictures, or simply theater, is a business ...

s Maxim, Kinopalatsi and Bristol. The northeastern part of Kluuvi, which includes the

Kaisaniemi park Kaisaniemi park (, ) is a popular park, in the center of Helsinki, in the region of Kluuvi. The Kaisaniemi Park was named after Cajsa Wahllund, Catharina "Cajsa" Wahllund. Part of the park was given to the University of Helsinki in 1829, for garden ...

, is commonly called Kaisaniemi, but it is not the official name of any neighbourhood in Helsinki. The neighbourhood is home to 23,000 jobs and several hundred inhabitants. The official name of the neighbourhood is very seldom used in everyday speech, Helsinkians usually refer to the area as "the centre" (''keskusta'') or "the core centre" (''ydinkeskusta'').

History

The Finnish word ''kluuvi'' and the Swedish word ''glo'' mean a gloe lake - a bay that is closed up or closing up. The district was originally a bay called Kluuvinlahti in the

Gulf of Finland The Gulf of Finland (; ; ; ) is the easternmost arm of the Baltic Sea. It extends between Finland to the north and Estonia to the south, to Saint Petersburg—the second largest city of Russia—to the east, where the river Neva drains into it. ...

, which eventually became swampy. The bay stretched from Töölönlahti to the Esplanadi park. It was the last remnant of a strait that had originally connected Töölönlahti and Eteläsatama but had already closed in the 16th century because of the

post-glacial rebound Post-glacial rebound (also called isostatic rebound or crustal rebound) is the rise of land masses after the removal of the huge weight of ice sheets during the last glacial period, which had caused isostatic depression. Post-glacial rebound an ...

. This also caused the island east to it to become a cape, which was named Vironniemi. The bay was filled in the middle of the 19th century. The odour of rotting

seaweed Seaweed, or macroalgae, refers to thousands of species of macroscopic, multicellular, marine algae. The term includes some types of ''Rhodophyta'' (red), '' Phaeophyta'' (brown) and ''Chlorophyta'' (green) macroalgae. Seaweed species such as ...

and other plants can still be smelled near construction sites. The street Vilhonkatu (approximately meaning "Wilhelm's street") was named in 1836, probably after the senator Otto Wilhelm Klinckowström, who oversaw the organisation of the Kaisaniemi park in the 1830s. The street had originally been named Wästra Mellan Gatan (Swedish for "western middle street") since 1820. The street got a Finnish name Vilhelminkatu in 1909, and was further renamed Vilhonkatu in 1928. The street Fabianinkatu has in turn been named after the governor-general Fabian Steinheil. Emperor

Alexander I of Russia Alexander I (, ; – ), nicknamed "the Blessed", was Emperor of Russia from 1801, the first king of Congress Poland from 1815, and the grand duke of Finland from 1809 to his death in 1825. He ruled Russian Empire, Russia during the chaotic perio ...

instructed Steinheil and state councillor Johan Albrecht Ehrenström in 1819 to give names to new streets planned in Helsinki and so they in a way acted as the first street name committee in the city. The street's unofficial Finnish name was Faapianinkatu until 1909.Terho et al. (ed.) 1970, p. 96. The

Helsinki Metro The Helsinki Metro (, ) is a rapid transit system serving the Helsinki capital region, Finland. It is the world's most northern, the world's northernmost metro system. It was opened to the general public on 2 August 1982 after 27 years of planni ...

construction found a ''kluuvi'' in the district, when it turned out the planned site for a metro tunnel was supposed to go didn't have a solid rock base. The soft ground had to be artificially frozen before it was possible to dig through it to construct a solid base for the metro track.

References

External links

{{coord, 60, 10, N, 24, 57, E, region:FI_type:city_source:GNS-enwiki, display=title Vironniemi district

History

See also

References

External links