Helsinki Bar (Helsinki Yacht Club)

The story

Drive east down Broadway in Uptown Butte until the road dead-ends into a perimeter fence. Beyond that wire sits the vast, toxic abyss of the Berkeley Pit—the open-pit copper operation that swallowed Butte's old Eastside during the 1950s. Standing right at the precipice is the Helsinki Bar, the last surviving building from what was once Finn Town.

Constructed in the late 1890s as a brick-veneered boarding house, the property became a Finnish stronghold when proprietor Hilda Nurmi took over in 1906. By 1911, the building housed a public sauna where hard-rock miners paid twenty-five cents to sweat out copper dust and socialize; by 1915, the steam bath ran from three in the afternoon until midnight, with Fridays strictly reserved for women. In 1937, local John Neimi converted the space into a beer parlor, laying the groundwork for the modern bar and its ironic alternate moniker, the Helsinki Yacht Club—a jab at being landlocked thousands of miles from open sea.

Inside, you'll find a pristine, squeaky-clean interior crammed with Finnish memorabilia, historic photos, and an unpretentious local spirit. Every March 16, the bar hosts Butte's St. Urho's Day celebration—a tongue-in-cheek Finnish holiday honoring the fictional saint who drove grasshoppers out of Finland—complete with a crowning ceremony that serves as the official, crowded warm-up to Butte's legendary St. Patrick's Day.