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, 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. 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 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.[1] The street Fabianinkatu has in turn been named after the governor-general
Fabian Steinheil. Emperor
Alexander I of Russia 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.[2]
The
Helsinki Metro 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.