Lepakko or Lepakkoluola was a place for independent youth culture in Helsinki

Helsinki

Helsinki is the capital and largest city in Finland. It is in the region of Uusimaa, located in southern Finland, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, an arm of the Baltic Sea. The population of the city of Helsinki is , making it by far the most populous municipality in Finland. Helsinki is...

, Finland

Finland

Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

, functioning from 1979 to 1999.

The building was mostly used for rock

Rock and roll

Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...

 concerts. Many Finnish rock

Finnish rock

Finnish rock refers to rock music made in Finland. The initial rock and roll boom of the 1950s was preceded by a long tradition of popular culture...

 artists came into popular knowledge through Lepakko. Lepakko also had a sauna

Sauna

A sauna is a small room or house designed as a place to experience dry or wet heat sessions, or an establishment with one or more of these and auxiliary facilities....

 and on special "steam club" nights one could enjoy sauna and music. The main organiser of the activity was ELMU ry, the Live Music Association of Helsinki.

Lepakko also hosted a radio station

Radio station

Radio broadcasting is a one-way wireless transmission over radio waves intended to reach a wide audience. Stations can be linked in radio networks to broadcast a common radio format, either in broadcast syndication or simulcast or both...

, Radio City, from 1985 to 1999.

The name Lepakko is Finnish

Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

 for bat

Bat

Bats are mammals of the order Chiroptera "hand" and pteron "wing") whose forelimbs form webbed wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight. By contrast, other mammals said to fly, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums, and colugos, glide rather than fly,...

 - the shape of the logo of the paint factory that previously owned the building had resembled a bat.

History

The Lepakko building was originally a warehouse

Warehouse

A warehouse is a commercial building for storage of goods. Warehouses are used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, transport businesses, customs, etc. They are usually large plain buildings in industrial areas of cities and towns. They usually have loading docks to load and unload...

 for a paint factory, built in 1940. From 1968 to 1978 it functioned as a shelter for homeless alcoholics. The City of Helsinki emptied the building in 1978.

In 1979, a group of young people and the ELMU invaded the building and negotiated with the city officials to make it a place for youth and culture. The house was at first named Lepakkoluola (Finnish for bat cave), the name was later in most occasions shortened to Lepakko.

Lepakko was demolished to make way for a new office building in 1999, despite complaints that it should be preserved as an institution and a monument of independent Finnish youth and rock culture. The City of Helsinki hired out Nosturi

Nosturi

Nosturi is a culture and music hall and a nightclub in the Punavuori district of Helsinki, Finland. It is owned by the Association of Live Music ....

to ELMU as a substitute.