Layered city

Election fever. Oh yes. Soon we’ll know the damage! Will a new lot of decision-makers come along who would advocate, like their 1960s predecessors, destroying Mannerheimintie’s neo-renaissance streetscapes to make way for glass and steel boxes? Which are only objectionable really when you stop to look and think.

Keep moving, folks. Go for a stroll, perhaps.

Before voting (or taking your Finnish partner to vote) you could do worse than to walk around Kallio. You’ll see post-war housing, the odd relic of low-rise wooden Helsinki, and a 21st-century municipal playground.

On Siltavuorenkatu you can see (from left to right) the Finnish National Board of Education (refurbed recently so it’s no longer considered ‘Finland’s ugliest building/pdf‘), some concrete brutalism at Merihaka and part of the city museum and the national archive.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the staff of the City of Helsinki’s Planning Department like to remind their audiences that a city is made up of layers – temporal layers. Here are a few more. Some more permanent than others. Some more uplifting than others.

In addition to those examples of Helsinki layers, JHJ would like to share some recent images of snow melting away.

Not a moonscape, but the grit and snow brought to Munkkiniemenranta and deposited there on the ice through the winter.

Ice pea

Zillions of people seemed to be out walking on the ice in front of our fair city on this sunny Sunday. But one poor b*****d in a boat has been going around in circles for hours preventing ice from forming so that more lorry-loads of snow can be dumped into the Baltic.

Anyone wanting to go there, take the 14B or 16 to the end stop, tip of Hernesaari, and be mesmerised.

Besides the zillions on the ice quite a few people were hanging out in Hernesaari. Part of New Helsinki (which is to say where Helsinki used to go to work when work was physical and manipulated stuff directly), Hernesaari is a strange thing. Largely landfill, the jobs still being done there will have to go in 2012 after which it will be liberated for uses with better price-quality ratios (as we Finns say).

Currently there are some sizeable harbour buildings and facilities. Loads of boaty things, helicoptery things, a place to get the statutory check up of your car sorted, and somewhere to arrive by cruise ship and buy souvenirs (at the back of the line of cars), and to park cars. Presumably they were mostly there to chauffeur kids to and from ice hockey or figure skating training.

My young ice-hockey playing friend was taken by public transport. He told me and the parent about how much he likes ice hockey. He also told us about the painting or mural on the wall of the cafe in the ice rink. Cafe Jääherne, Ice Pea. (Yes, Herne does mean pea). I’d already spotted the mural on the corrugated iron wall. And I’d photographed it (small people in vastly expensive sports gear whizzing around an ice rink is a cute thing to watch but it didn’t really sustain my interest very long).

So my friend told me that the people who run the cafe are going to build a new one when the ice rink (once some industrial building) gets torn down and is replaced by all those new homes. That’s why they drew a picture of what the future will be like.

The cafe is a bit hard to see, but it’s there on the right-hand corner of the cross street, by the yellow car

My little friend’s parent started to say something along the lines of, why is Helsinki being turned into luxury homes. I’m not sure Hernesaari will be but even if it does fall victim to waterfront-development, I’d not know how to have a very constructive discussion about it.

So we began to talk about pancake. While one guy had some.

Friends and heroes

Nice weather for Friends’ Day (probably Valentines Day to some of you good folks).

February in Finnish is helmikuu (not capitalised). Helmi means pearl. Quite apt, don’t you think?

Looking the other way you get a view of some things that earlier generations of Helsinki residents thought worth giving prominence, modern hospitals. The brownish “tower” on the right is the iconic [sic] Lastenlinna or the Children’s Castle inaugurated in the early 1920s when Finland, as a nation, was barely a toddler.

Its architecture (Elsi Borg) and the carvings on the facade (Sakari Tohka) are worth a close-up look and its history is worth pondering. A key instigator of this hospital for women and children was Sophie Mannerheim,  pioneer of modern medical care and sister of that slightly better known hero with the same surname.

January Colourless

It’s perfect weather. For this time of year, this place. A few degrees below zero. The snow makes the evenings light (the days tend to be dark). City life feels good.

Generations of Helsinki’s and Finland’s decision makers have left a legacy of solid architecture and urban infrastructure. Mostly people take good care of it. (Poor caretakers, they don’t do Sundays when there’s this much snow. Ours was out first thing this morning, shovelling and clearing snow with his little pavement snow plough/plow).

Dogs occasionally piss on the city, leaving ugly marks.

Sometimes I think others are pissing on it too.

I’m beginning to long for summer. Fat chance, there’s months more of grey to come. For a bit of colour and some lovely sketches of this fair city, why not visit this blog. For great regular photos, there’s this. (Thanks PPusa, you didn’t quit after all!)

Off now to the City Museum to check out some photos of Helsinki from the 1970s. It was a kind of black-and-white decade. But a nice one. There was enough room for us kids to play on the streets. We were like fish in a sea, not noticing the water around us, Helsinki’s architecture.

Helsinki allyearround

Finland is still a place where healthy outdoor pursuits are in high regard. It may be getting dark by 4pm, but the outdoors is still there for your enjoyment. Varieties of skating, wind gliding, fishing through holes in the ice, horse riding/ trotting, skiing (down as well as across), snow boarding and tobogganing are some of the things my friends do, and there’s a blog I read from time to time by someone who ice climbs in the Helsinki area.

When the weather is a great as it has been (trust me, overcast & snowy is a heck of a lot better than overcast and rainy!) you also get the odd fun contraption like the thing in the pic above, a hoijakka (or napakelkka i.e. navel-sledge?! pivot-sled? any North American readers out there with a name suggestion?) This one’s on the ice between the very silly Sibelius monument (glowing in the dark in the background) and the very lovely Regatta Cafe.

So today was special as my radius of activities extended massively. Not quite to being whizzed around on a hoijakka but certainly to beyond the 15 metres on foot or the 10Euros worth by taxi I’ve got used to in the last couple of months. I can now resume that (other) old Helsinki tradition of spending Sunday afternoons sipping coffee or tea. On my very own steam and supported by crutches with spikes (for the ice), together with my life companion, I walked a few hundred metres along Sibelius street to Merikanto street and over to our old friend Cafe Regatta.

We think it’s safe to say that good cheer, silly humour, hot drinks and excellent korvapuusti are available there all-year-round (kokovuoden).

Immobilized in Helsinki, not Heathrow

Helsinki is very quiet. Or is it just our front room? Looking out over the park, I see drifts of light snow hanging off the edges of roofs, cars, rocky outcrops and window ledges. But I see no people. A few lights are on in windows across the back and the front of the house. Boxing Day (or St Stephens Day as Finns know it) seems like a day of quiet even if Stephen’s Dances are a kind of an institution (or was that just in the old days?) for people desperate after 3 days of family to get out of the house.

It’s quiet everywhere, that is, that I can reach. Everywhere that I can reach, that is, without going online to travel the world and finding all kinds of activities that may or may not make me feel more alive. Or more connected.

Nope, I’ll just stay immobile, thanks. I’ll take the opportunity to read books and other old fashioned stuff. This, for instance: a reprint of an album of etchings of Helsinki made in the 1877s. It was a time when people did move and did travel but they did it at a pace that must have given their bodies and minds time to adjust to the displacement.

Seems the elements (the returning repressed?) are conspiring to get more and more people to stay in place. The Brits, impatient to be constantly on the move it seems, aren’t taking the coldest December ever lying down though [seems you did travel online, Ed?!].

The UK government is considering fining those who fail to fix the problems the elements cause. The elements, after all, are bad for business (though Boxing Day sales are apparently doing well in the UK). In Britain someone is always expected to make unexpected (forecast but still extreme) conditions seem as if nothing had happened to disrupt the normal flow of business. So BAA is to be fined if it doesn’t make flying easier…

The Finns, perhaps with a more intimate relationship with the elements, are being encouraged to avoid travel today if they can. The roads are in an atrocious state almost across the country. And as our intrepid reporter reports, no sign of sales here.

Not still falling – being carted away

While international news reminds us here at the top of Europe that bad stuff routinely happens here too, the other news today makes us here at JHJ realise withs some surprise that thus far we have not taken up the topic of sisu, Finns’ favourite word according to the New York Times. Actually, with such illustrious wordsmiths covering it, we’ll leave discussing sisu to others.

The Deputy Mayor responsible for Public Works and Environmental Affairs Pekka Sauri, however, wants us all to show a bit of it (sisu) in these difficult times.

With record amounts of snow everywhere, Sauri has finally come out of his comfort zone where he has actually (according to taxi drivers) been quietly enjoying the misery of Helsinki’s car-driving public. Their needs (according to the same taxi driver) don’t matter to this Green politician. Whether or not one holds Sauri and the Greens responsible for record amounts of snow, for insufficient or badly managed clearing or for not allowing climate change to happen fast enough, the enormous amounts of weather we have been having once again in Helsinki are certainly a talking point.

Last week I finally heard a rumour that Sauri (or someone else, the taxi driver hesitated) was doing a reconnaissance trip into the city to find out what was going on. Everyone else knew. Buses, lorries and cars skidded around, dozens of trams got stuck behind illegally parked cars, hundreds of people parked illegally because their owners are very important and must leave their cars sticking out into the roadway and tram lines even if it means causing the whole tram network to be snarled up. A few people have been seen cycling, old ladies have screamed themselves red in the face at helpful ushers and porters who have not been able to either procure better taxi service or get the snow to stop falling, and another taxi driver (age about 21 1/2) complained to me today that folks aren’t what they used to be. In his childhood people would get off a bus and help push or at least lighten the load (I must have missed that episode of Life in Helsinki).

Finally, finally, Sauri announced special measures, operation snow fight. But this is where that old-fashioned spirit of collaboration (and the sisu) are needed. We must all work together to cope with the weather! Car drivers in particular must show solidarity!

To get a handle on all the offending snow, the staff of Stara (rebränded municipal environmental services) who are doing the clearing, have been given permission to tow parked cars without the usual warnings (but only to within somewhere close by so that owners don’t all go getting heart attacks when they can’t find their cars). Owners must nevertheless do their bit and grab those shovels!

Meanwhile, Sauri the Green reminds Helsinkians that public transport would be so much more sensible than the motor car. I doubt anyone is listening. Never seen Mannerheimintie so clogged up as tonight, and the clots in the system weren’t piles of snow, but piles of metal.

Where the snow has been cleared and where people aren‘t screaming at or blaming others, the city is as gorgeous as ever, not least in its old mini-imperial centre. Like here, at the University‘s Topelia, early 19th-century architecture flexible enough to have served as a school for poor children, a hospital (until the 1990s!) and a work-place for (poor) social scientist.

p.s. a letter in  the usual suggests that car owners be charged a levy to pay for whatever equipment is still needed to avoid the city going through such frustration and silliness.

Pictures of geography

Finnair staff remain on strike. As support strikes spread, pessimists quip that the company may go bust. Others (optimists?) discuss the merger of trades unions in the transport sector (note: geography matters for a country like Finland!) Petrol prices are rising. The snowy weather continues to preoccupy. The Greens have been held responsible for the very generous amounts of snow to be seen, felt and suffered all over the city [as in, there isn’t the equipment/manpower to clear roads]. They are also responsible for a baffling start to parliamentary election campaigning. The widening gap between Finland’s poor and its rich continues to animate conversation (interviewees at the President’s Independence ball, for example) but there are few signs of anyone doing anything about it at a political level, only charitable individuals and groups catering to soup kitchens, once again growing in Helsinki. Only the extreme right appear to consider taxation to be a matter of social justice. Swine flu may be back. Britain sees university politics get ugly. Finnish academics smile as they muse on how one might even begin to convince an ignorant barbarian to cherish free enquiry. Helsinki is beautiful.

For a few days there was no wind. The snow stayed just where it had fallen.

The National Museum is beautiful.

Katajanokka is particularly beautiful particularly in the sunshine.

The last picture is of Kauppiaankatu 2, by our old friend Usko Nystrom.