postwar media / how not to get hit by a bike / contents / prev / next


ost first-time visitors to Amsterdam would rather get a migraine than a history lesson. If you feel that way, as I did once, just skip this part. The story of Amsterdam will still be there when you're ready.

But if you spend enough time here, sooner or later history will ambush you. One day you're gonna look up and wonder what the hell is that thing? How did it get here? Why is it leaning like that? What happened here? The depth of time is like a pile of shit: the sudden awareness that you're standing in it can be a little startling.

Whose idea was Amsterdam? Who was that first guy to say the words out loud: "Ya know? We really oughta build a dam here!" I want a transcript of that meeting. But they weren't writing it down, they were just trying to stay alive. These nether lands were soggy, covetous seas snarling east and west, floods making regular lunch of anybody's effort to win a living. Hol Land was literally a land of holes — ponds, gullies, marshes, bogs and precious little good solid earth. The early Hollanders didn't settle the land, they made it, building dikes and dams to master the flow. We don't know how long people were trying to scrape by here on the banks of the lower Amstel, before those devastating floods of 1170 came and went. But one day they decided to build a dam on the river. And that changed everything.

Time begins for Amsterdam at that point, by the river's mouth, and radiates centrifugally across eight centuries.

By then, Paris already had a throbbing university; Rome had already been there and done that. Amsterdam may look old to us, but as European cities go it's your pesky kid sister. It's not that Amsterdam is old. It just hasn't totally burned to the ground again since 1452. So many of its older streets and houses are still here. For now. (And before the Luftwaffe showed up in May 1940 you could have said the same about Rotterdam.) But of that original settlement, nothing remains but the streets themselves, and whatever artifacts pop up when somebody tries to build a parking garage.

During the 1200s a narrow fishing village took shape here, attracting ship builders, ropemakers, blacksmiths, merchants, even farmers. To keep dry, they flanked themselves with four long earthen embankments, or dikes. These became the earliest streets: what we now call Nieuwendijk and Harlemmerdijk on the left bank, Warmoesstraat and Zeedijk on the right. A lock beside the Dam allowed boats from the Amstel down to the Ij harbor and back. This divided the river into upper and lower marinas: the Dam Rak below the Dam and the Rak In upstream, each of them packed with boats and small ships. (Damrak and Rokin still form the axis of the inner city, albeit a paved one; the river now vanishes abruptly at Muntplein. The last remnants of the dam were dug up long ago. Standing in "Dam Square" today you see no sign that a river ever flowed here.)

Before long the fishers were catching more than the town could eat. So they started selling the surplus abroad, in places like northern Germany and Denmark. And instead of returning with an empty hold, they started bringing other stuff back to sell here — beer, grain, lumber. This is how the fishers and sailors began to evolve into international merchants.

By 1275 the town was already showing some muscle. That year the Count of Holland proclaimed in writing that "the inhabitants of the Amstel Dam" didn't have to pay the county waterway toll as long as they transported their own goods. What's left of that piece of paper is preserved at the Municipal Archives; it's the first recorded appearance of the name of the town.

Notice how matter-of-fact the older place names sound. Later on, Amsterdam would be furiously naming its streets after poets, saboteurs, rivers, distant mountains, even electronic parts (yes, they really have streets named after transformers and switches). But the old place names are just plain functional. The city itself is named for the Amstel Dam. The oldest church is called the Old Church (Oude Kerk, dating from 1306). The side of town it's on is known as "the old side" or oude zijd. In Rembrandt's day, what we know as Rembrandtplein was still the Botermarkt (Butter Market). Muntplein is where they used to mint coins; before that it was called Schapenplein (Sheep Square). West of the Damrak there's a tiny street called Haringpakkerssteeg — the alley of those who pack herring.



The little town's population boomed. Its repute as a marketplace spread, its economy diversified, and its stores of wealth increased. Amsterdam was becoming important — and a tempting target for plundering. So it began to dig defensive waterways around itself. The Singel, meaning belt, formed the perimeter of the old city. Beyond the original dikes they started building ramparts, or burgwallen, named simply for their front or rear position on what side of town they defended. Hence Amsterdam's more famously tongue-defying place names: Nieuwe-zijds Voor-burgwal is the "new side's front rampart" and Oude-zijds Achter-burgwal the "old side's back rampart." We look today at any one of these lovely canals and just call it a canal. But to the guys who built it, it was a gracht, burgwal, schans, sloot or sluis — depending on what it was for.

One reason why a place like Amsterdam has so many canals is its penchant for inventing new land. In a low-lying area, when you move some mud to plump up a bit of land, the place you dug it from is gonna fill with water. Do that systematically and you end up with a network of drainage ditches, or sloten. Add a few windmills to pump the water over to the far side of a dike, and pretty soon you have a new place to live. You build on the dry parts, and use the wet parts for navigation.

The lacework of canals was also a function of the city's mixed economy. If Amsterdam had remained a simple fishing village, one harbor and one market square would have been enough. But with different commodities and industries seething across town, canals were the easiest way to move stuff around between all the different quays, warehouses, workshops and markets.

The big plaza that grew up around the Dam was, and still is, the heart of the city. They built a weighing house on one side; the stadhuis or city hall stood across the way. Public executions were carried out in front of it — some horrifying, like burning people alive or cutting their hearts out and chopping them up. They don't do that any more.


The Dam during the April carnival

You may have noticed that Amsterdam seems to be mostly made of bricks. Brick buildings, brick canal walls, brick sidewalks — billions and billions of bricks.

In fact early Amsterdam was mostly built of timber. One old wooden house — imaginatively named "the Wooden House" (het Houten Huis) — still stands in the courtyard of the Begijnhof, a secluded old nun's residence next to the Spui. But most of these were destroyed. In 1421 a fire devastated much of Amsterdam. Over 30 years they rebuilt the place. Then in 1452 a new conflagration flared on a night of fierce winds, and didn't exhaust itself until almost the entire city, with its precious warehoused goods, was reduced to ashes. This time, the city council said okay enough already, and decreed that all Amsterdam buildings should henceforth have brick walls.

Another 30 years on, they got so brick-crazy they decided to enclose the whole city in one great brick defensive wall, on a sandstone base. It was a gargantuan engineering project for its time. Whole new land areas had to be raised up just to build a wall across them. So they needed a lot of bricks — badly enough that people convicted of misdemeanors were forced to pay their fines in bricks. The city wall was punctuated by defensive towers like the Schreierstoren, and city gates like St Anthoniespoort (now called de Waag because it later became a weighing house).

Amsterdam's great city wall was finished in 1494. About a century later they tore it all down again.

Remnants of the old city wall: base of the Munt tower

What happened? By the end of the 1500s all of Europe was convulsing in religious turmoil, whose real impulse was a demand for political/economic change. The Netherlands fought off Spanish domination and became an independent republic. Amsterdam itself changed hands, and the Catholic elite was replaced by a Protestant one. With the usual understatement, Dutch historians call this "the Alteration". Things altered. The new regents had a real go-ahead attitude about world trade, and when the rival city of Antwerp was smothered by a pirate blockade, Amsterdam really took the lead. Meanwhile the continent-wide upheaval was driving swarms of refugees toward this city, in search not merely of fortune but of relief from persecution elsewhere. Around 1600 the city was ready to burst its seams. So it did.

They ripped down the city wall, obliterated some existing poor neighborhoods, built some new islands, and started laying out a huge counterclockwise sweep of elegant canals from east to west — ultimately quadrupling the city's physical size. On the map, Amsterdam grows a visibly different layer with a manmade concentric design. This grachtengordel, or canal belt, would be a new residential area for merchants at the height of prosperity. The three famous canals, Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht — canals of gentlemen, emperors and princes — gave name to the status aspirations of the guys who built homes there.

Prinsengracht

And when the old stadhuis on the Dam burnt down at mid-century, they hired architect Jacob van Campen to raise one much grander, more suitably imposing for a commercial world capital.

Radial streets like spokes of a wheel carried the names of the cities they pointed at: Leidsestraat toward Leiden, Utrechtsestraat toward Utrecht. The Netherlands then was Amsterdam's back yard; its front yard was the globe. And along the western perimeter, a wedge-shaped area was left aside for workers' housing. It's called the Jordaan. Over the centuries it would become a furnace of civil unrest and open rebellion.

Finally the city had spread as far as the Singelgracht, just beyond where Leidseplein is now. And there, it kinda ran out of steam. The new city limit would stand for a good century and a half. Why?

Just as the grand urban expansion was reaching completion, Amsterdam was showing signs of outgrowing its early mercantile vigor. Homo Amstelodamensis was mutating again: the fishers and sailors who had evolved into merchants were now evolving into bankers. World finance supplanted world commerce as the city's driving force, and the city began to grow quaint. During the 1700s its fortunes wobbled together with the wars and tribulations of the western world. In the early 1800s the city was taken by Louis Napoleon, who turned the stadhuis into a royal palace — then taken back by the Dutch royal house of Orange, who seem to have forgotten to turn it back into a stadhuis.

Amsterdam's days as a kickass city-state were done. It was part of the "Kingdom of the Netherlands" now.

Postkantoor, now a shopping mall

In 1867 city engineer van Niftrik unveiled a huge colorful map depicting his plan for the next expansion of Amsterdam. He'd fulfilled his assignment; the city council thanked him and filed his pretty map away. On paper it looked great, both consequent and whole with the original beauty of the town. But it would be too expensive and too systematic, leaving insufficient wrestling room for the entrepreneurs on one side and the social reformers on the other. So the van Niftrik plan became one of many Amsterdams that might have been.

Toward the close of that century, the new pressures on Amsterdam were well beyond human scale: the age of steam, the opening of the North Sea Canal, a consolidation of colonial trade. And the physical response would be more haphazard. The world was careening into an era of debate. The Amsterdam that grew was a patchwork of colliding moralities as much as of architectural styles. Cheap working-class developments smeared across the southern suburbs, while a zone of stately mansions rose around P J H Cuypers' fantastic new Rijksmuseum. The traditional green space in the eastern Plantage got smothered in middle-class housing — while lovely Vondelpark spurted out southwestward. A huge neogothic post office towered behind the Dam. The amazing crystalline Paleis van Volksvlijt (Palace of People's Industry) rose in Frederiksplein, offering symposia and music for the masses, until it was destroyed by fire in 1929 (to be eventually replaced by a monumental act of vandalism known as the Nederlandse Bank).

It was an age of projects great and cruel. Transportation was changing, and many old waterways were rudely filled in to become streets. The pictureque Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal was sacrificed for a traffic artery, with an electric tram line leading to the new railway station. The crowning insult was Centraal Station itself, opening in 1889 on a manmade island strapped across the mouth of the Amstel — literally sealing the city off from its own waterfront. It sparked ferocious protest, but nobody could stop it. And when the gagging of Amsterdam seemed a fait accompli, devout Calvinists complained that Cuypers' neogothic style was tastelessly ornate.

At the edges, municipal Amsterdam swelled to absorb its suburbs. Downtown, they filled in the Rozengracht and punched right through a section of Herengracht to form a traffic axis to the Dam. Another axis was widened, shearing off one whole side of the Vijzelstraat. By the 1920s the legendary H P Berlage was supervising design of new, more livable neighborhood to the southeast — the Rivierenbuurt — eschewing symmetry in favor of wholeness. Waves of building style washed over Amsterdam, from neogothic to Jugendstil, Art Deco to Amsterdam School to the New Pragmatism. Occasionally somebody would rescue just the gable-stone — a small tile with a bas-relief sculpture — from a doomed 17th century building. A collection of these mysterious sticky-notes from the past now whispers to us from a wall outside the Historical Museum. Others peek out from random corners scattered around the city.

With the worldwide poverty of the 1930s, development slowed to a crawl. Desperation bred mistrust — especially of the new waves of foreign refugees pouring in from Germany. A new insult came into vogue: volksvreemd, folk-strange, or "alien to our people". Currents of worker dissatisfaction became full-fledged political movements. Which would prove more dangerous — the right wing nationalists or the left wing communists?


On 10 May 1940 it became a moot question. Amsterdam was interrupted. Germany grabbed Holland on the pretext of protecting it from an English invasion. The real plan was to annex the Netherlands (which Hitler called "Westland") as a permanent part of greater Germany. When the Germans rolled into town, some people rejoiced. Some committed suicide.

It's well known that Holland was a victim of Nazi aggression — because that's how it turned out in the end. What's less well known is that in the first month of German occupation, membership in the Dutch Nazi party (the NSB) skyrocketed. And that of the tens of thousands of Jews deported to the east, the overwhelming majority were arrested by Dutchmen. People everywhere want to be on the winning side, and to do what seems fitting at the moment. But over five years of occupation, it became clear that Nazi domination wasn't a good thing. The country and the city were steadily bled of industrial, agricultural and human resources to feed Germany's war effort. Much of the wealth of Amsterdam, and many thousands of its people, were lost. But some people got rich. Some Amsterdammers worked openly with the fascists; some worked secretly against them; most just tried to keep their heads down and get by. When the Nazi machine started running out of Jews and communists to export, it started scooping up every able-bodied young Dutchman in sight to send off into slave labor. That's when the ranks of the resistance really began to swell. And once it became clear that Germany was about to lose the war, people came crawling out of the woodwork to join up with the Binnenlandse Strijdkracht (Interior Strikeforce).

But Amsterdam would be liberated about nine months too late. In August 1944, Queen Wilhemina — speaking on Radio Oranje from exile in London — called on the Dutch to support a big allied push in the south, with railroad strikes and sabotage in the north. Had operation Market Garden succeeded, Amsterdam would have been free in September. When it failed, the Amsterdammers were bitterly punished, and left to starve and freeze. The winter was one long dark hunger. For months no food or fuel got into the city. People stole whatever could be burned to stay warm, stripping lumber from abandoned houses, or digging up the wood blocks under the tram tracks. Many made long pilgrimages into the farm country of West Friesland in search of food. When there was nothing else to eat, they boiled tulip bulbs. It was not until early May 1945 that the Germans finally pulled out and the Canadians pulled in.

The aftermath was recrimination, mistrust, numbness. Small-time political collaborators were punished; big-time business collaborators were mostly let off the hook. New heroes from the resistance were celebrated, thanked, and then mothballed because their politics were inconvenient to the time. And the city moved on.


The Fusilladeplaats: monument to hostages executed on this spot
by Germans in March 1945, in retaliation for an act of "terrorism"


Amsterdam is time rippling. It pings at the mouth of the Amstel, spreads through that old medieval kernel, then waits a moment. It blooms again in a stately rennaissance of canal belt rings, then waits a moment. It washes across a grand chaotic Victorian-era building spree, then waits a moment. It swells once more across the machine age to devour surrounding towns like an amoeba. Then it waits another moment, enduring Great Depression and Nazi occupation, before continuing to ooze every which way. It disspates, for now, in bleak futuristic suburbs like 'de Aker', where I lived in 2003 — but which according to expedia.nl did not yet exist. And of course in geological time, the whole thing is one quick splat.

And now ... here you are.


(Sources for this historical dope: Kok, A A, De historische schoonheid van Amsterdam, Allert de Lange, Amsterdam 1941; de Jong, L, De bezetting, Uitgeverij Querido, Amsterdam 1964; Roest, Friso & Scheren, Jos, Oorlog in de stad, van Gennep, Amsterdam 1998; Mak, Geert, Een kleine geschiedenis van Amsterdam, Olympus, Amsterdam 1994. Geert Mak's book is available in English as Amsterdam: a brief life of the city, Harvill Press, London 1999 — an excellent read.)



postwar media / how not to get hit by a bike / contents / prev / next