The Bar With a Hole in the Ceiling for an Airship

Commercial partnership: Solo Sokos Hotel Torni

Hotel Torni was completed in 1931. 69.5 metres, Finland's tallest building.

Since then the house has poured liquor through prohibition, housed spies from both sides of a war, and at one point belonged entirely to the Soviet Union.

Four stories you won't find in the lobby brochure.

1. The lift had an alarm bell

Torni opened on 19 March 1931. Prohibition ended on 5 April 1932. The building's speakeasy phase lasted 13 months, and it made the most of them.

According to the hotel's own history, engineer Lahtinen wired an electric bell into the lift. When the doorman spotted police coming in, he hit the button. Eleven floors up, the alarm rang, and the bottles were tipped down the drain before the lift arrived.

A second line ran to the taxi rank outside. When a guest left the party floor who had no business standing around on the street, a car was already waiting downstairs.

It wasn't risk management. It was customer service.

2. After the war, it stopped being a hotel

In October 1944, the Soviet-led Allied Control Commission made Torni its headquarters. Every hotel and restaurant space was handed over to them, the staff were let go, and the British delegation was left with a single room downstairs.

A billiard hall and a cinema went in, along with the Soviets' own duty-free liquor shop. When the commission left in 1947, the building was in such bad shape it had to be rebuilt from scratch.

And in October 1959, an American named Lee Harvey Oswald checked into Torni for two nights. He was on his way to defect to the Soviet Union.

3. That hole in the ceiling

There's a hole in the ceiling of Ateljee Bar. As the story goes at the hotel, it was built for an airship: a zeppelin would dock on the roof and passengers would climb down a ladder straight to a cocktail.

The Graf Zeppelin really did visit Finland, on 24 September 1930. But the planned landing site was the fields of Viikki, a gust of wind stopped the docking, and the airship never landed at all. Torni itself wasn't finished for another six months.

The hole is still there anyway. Order a drink and look up: nobody has ever managed to prove to you what it was actually built for.

4. Two lamps are still missing

When the building was renovated in 2019 to 2022, dusty wall lamps turned up at the back of a storeroom. According to the hotel, they're by Paavo Tynell, whose lamps get auctioned off around the world.

They now hang in American Bar.

Two are still missing. One turned up at an auction in Paris, and nobody knows if it will ever come home.

Where to drink

American Bar (1960) makes its syrups and berry dust in-house. This is where the Tynell lamps are.

Ateljee Bar (1951) sits on the 12th floor, one of the Helsinki rooftop bars worth knowing about. The hotel still gives the space to an artist for their debut show, and one piece stays in the collection afterward.

OR is the brasserie on the corner, with a Rôtisseurs plaque from 2023.

O'Malley's opened in 1981, according to the hotel, and was one of Finland's first Irish pubs. One regular's favourite seat has its own little sign.

And in the lobby, look at the lift: the original lattice-gate elevator from 1931 is still running.

Hotel Torni

• Address: Yrjönkatu 26, Helsinki
• Completed: 19 March 1931 · 69.5 m, Finland's tallest building at the time
• Architects: Jung & Jung
• Bars: Ateljee Bar (12th floor), American Bar, OR, O'Malley's
• Opening hours: Ateljee Bar open daily (Fri–Sat 12–02, Sun 12–24; other days see raflaamo.fi)
• Bookings: sokoshotels.fi · table bookings raflaamo.fi

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