Kallio

This guide to Kallio in Helsinki opens with a puzzle: in the 1940s, sixteen hundred children filled the neighborhood's schools; today it's under three hundred, on the same crowded streets. It traces the granite bedrock the district is built on, the church Lars Sonck raised straight out of that rock between 1908 and 1912, and the wooden houses and cramped tenements that packed more than thirty-five thousand people in by 1939. From the belfry, on a clear day, you can supposedly make out the Estonian coast.