• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 532 0

a castle in 1204. Sixty years later, the Amstel was dammed – leading to the name “Amstelredam” – and the village began to flourish as a trading centre. The city then developed in stages, each of which was marked by the digging of new canals to either side of the main canal linking the River IJ with Dam Square, along today’s Damrak. The city grew at first around the canals of today’s Red Light District and after that on the other side of the Damrak. Time and again the wooden buildings of medieval Amsterdam went up in smoke, until finally, after a particularly severe fire in 1452, timber was banned in favour of brick and stone – and it’s these handsome canal houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that provide the Old Centre with most of its architectural high points.

However, it’s a modern building project that has dominated this part of the city in recent years: the plan to redevelop the station and the area around it at the same time as building a new metro line linking Amsterdam’s city centre with the south of the city and stations across the IJ in the resurgent North. City centre stations are to be built at Centraal Station, Rokin and the Vijzelgracht, and for the best part of six years now the area around Stationsplein especially has been a massive construction site; the chaos looks set to continue for some time, until completion of the project in 2015. There has been huge controversy over the plan: some question whether it’s even possible to build a tunnel under a city centre that is mainly built on wooden stilts, and work was halted for a while in 2008 when a number of city centre buildings began to collapse. But the authorities are determined to press on, and claim they will deliver not only better connections between the city centre and its outlying districts, but also a more pleasant, pedestrian-friendly Stationsplein and inner harbour. Whatever the result, it will seem like an improvement after the upheaval of the past few years.

The Old Centre |

Damrak and the Nieuwe Zijde

Running from Centraal Station to Dam Square, the Damrak – a broad, rather unenticing avenue lined with tacky restaurants, bars and bureaux de change – slices south into the heart of the city, first passing an inner harbour crammed with the bobbing canal cruise boats of Amsterdam’s considerable tourist industry. It was a canal until 1672, when it was filled in; up until then it had been the medieval city’s main nautical artery, with boats sailing up it to discharge their goods right in the centre of town on the main square. Thereafter, with the docks moved elsewhere, the Damrak became a busy commercial drag, as it remains today, and Dam Square became the centre of municipal power.

To the west of the Damrak lies the Old Centre’s Nieuwe Zijde, whose outer boundary was marked in the 1500s by a defensive wall, hence the name of its principal avenue, Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal (“In Front of the Town Wall on the New Side”). The wall disappeared as the city grew, and in the nineteenth century the canal that ran through the middle of the street was earthed in, leaving the unusually wide thoroughfare that you see today. This area was, however, badly mauled by the developers in the 1970s and – give or take a scattering of old canal houses on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal – there’s no great reason to linger.

Centraal Station

The Old Centre | Damrak and the Nieuwe Zijde |

Centraal Station and Stationsplein

With its high gables and cheerful brickwork, the neo-Renaissance Centraal Station is an imposing prelude to the city. At the time of its construction on an artifical island in the 1880s, it aroused much controversy because it effectively separated the centre from the River IJ, source of the city’s wealth, for the first time in Amsterdam’s long history. There was controversy about the choice of architect too; the man chosen, Petrus J.H. Cuypers, was Catholic, and in powerful Protestant circles there were mutterings about the vanity of his designs (he had recently completed the Rijksmuseum) and their unsuitability for Amsterdam. In the event,