Vana-Kalamaja Street and Tallinn houses

Vana-Kalamaja Street links Baltic Station with the northern part of the district and the sea. Among its wooden facades, there is a special type of apartment building: two symmetrical residential wings, with a strip of brick or plaster in the middle. A stone staircase is hidden behind it. This detail is how you recognize a Tallinn house.

After the First World War, the city lacked inexpensive apartments. The railway, the port, and Kalamaja’s businesses provided work for laborers and drew people from the countryside, but they needed to live nearby: a daily journey across the city consumed part of a small wage. By nineteen twenty-two, housing construction had almost come to a halt—there were few private developers, and an ordinary wooden apartment building could no longer be built under the old rules.

The state then offered construction loans at four percent, repayable over fifty years. Municipalities, construction firms, plot owners, and small entrepreneurs received the money. For a private developer, this was a debt lasting almost an entire working life, to be repaid from rent. So a house had to accommodate enough tenants without bankrupting the developer on materials or violating fire-safety requirements.

The rules in force since nineteen oh three required two wooden staircases to be replaced by one stone staircase. When construction resumed in the interwar years, developers used precisely this arrangement. One stairwell took up less space, inexpensive wooden apartments could be placed on both sides, and the stone middle section met fire-safety requirements. After timber prices fell in nineteen thirty-two, this layout became even more profitable.

The architect Karl Tarvas, who at the time bore the surname Treumann, turned it into a plan that could quickly be adapted to different plots. The son of a carpenter, he made his living designing affordable family housing and made sure that economizing did not turn a house into a barracks. Usually, eight apartments fit inside, mostly two-room units. Amenities remained modest, bathrooms were rare, and a laundry room or shop was set up in the high basement. Tarvas did not limit himself to drawings and often inspected the construction himself.

By the late nineteen thirties, his office was producing several dozen such designs a month. Over two decades, almost one thousand houses with a central stone staircase were built in Tallinn; about two thirds were designed by Tarvas’s employees. Owners received income-producing buildings, while workers and lower-paid office employees received small apartments near their places of work. The housing shortage was not eliminated completely, but this method of construction spread through Kalamaja, Pelgulinn, and Kadriorg.

The houses were called “Tallinn” houses because most of them were built in the capital. More than five hundred survive. On Vana-Kalamaja Street, what remains from developers’ calculations and the work of Tarvas’s office is that same stone strip between the wooden wings—the shared staircase around which apartments were arranged for people who earned their living on the railway, in workshops, and at the port.