Eira

This guide to the Eira neighborhood in Helsinki opens with eight physicians in a rented wooden building in 1901, pooling their savings rather than keep working inside the city's overcrowded public wards. It follows architect Lars Sonck's 1905 hospital building at Laivurinkatu and Tehtaankatu, and the doctors' choice to name it after Eir, the healing goddess of the Poetic Edda. The surrounding villa district, with its low mansard roofs and streets that follow the shoreline's own curves, grew up around that hospital through the 1910s and borrowed its name.