Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [34]
The Old Centre |
Nieuwmarkt and around
The eastern reaches of the Red Light District peter out at cobbled Nieuwmarkt, a wide-open, sometimes druggy square that centres on the turreted Waag. Nieuwmarkt is within easy walking distance of a pleasant residential district situated between two canals – Geldersekade and Oudeschans – and lies at the end of the outermost of the three eastern canals of fifteenth-century Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal, a long, dead-straight waterway flanked by a string of dignified facades. Together, these canals make for one of the most engaging parts of the city, especially at the southern end, where a small pocket of placid waterways and handsome old canal houses spreads over to neighbouring Groenburgwal – a narrow and almost impossibly pretty waterway.
The Old Centre | Nieuwmarkt and around |
Nieuwmarkt
Nieuwmarkt was long one of the city’s most important markets and the place where Gentiles and Jews from the nearby Jewish Quarter – just southeast along St Antoniebreestraat – traded. All that came to a traumatic end during World War II, when the Germans cordoned off the Nieuwmarkt with barbed wire and turned it into a holding pen. After the war, the square’s old exuberance never returned and these days all that remains of its former trading is a small organic food market on Saturdays (9am–5pm).
The focus of the square, the sprawling, multi-turreted Waag, dating from the 1480s, has had a chequered history. Built as one of the city’s fortified gates, Sint Antoniespoort, Amsterdam’s expansion soon made it obsolete and the ground floor was turned into a municipal weighing-house, with the rooms upstairs taken over by the surgeons’ guild. It was here that the surgeons held lectures on anatomy and public dissections, the inspiration for Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, displayed in the Mauritshuis Collection in The Hague. Abandoned by the surgeons and the weigh-masters in the nineteenth century, the building served as a furniture store and a fire station before falling into disuse, though it has recently been renovated to house a good café-bar and restaurant, In de Waag.
The Old Centre | Nieuwmarkt and around |
Oudeschans
The Montelbaanstoren is a sturdy tower dating from 1512 that overlooks the Oudeschans, a canal dug around the same time to improve the city’s shipping facilities. The tower was built to protect the city’s eastern flank but its decorative spire was added later, when the city felt more secure, by Hendrick de Keyser, the architect who did much to create Amsterdam’s prickly skyline.
The Scheepvaarthuis (Shipping Building), at Prins Hendrikkade 108, is an unusual edifice on the corner of Binnenkant. Completed in 1917, this is one of the flashiest of the buildings designed by the Amsterdam School of architecture, the work of a certain Johann Melchior van der Mey (1878–1949). An almost neurotically decorated edifice covered with a welter of detail celebrating the city’s marine connections, the entrance is shaped like a prow and surmounted by statues of Poseidon and Amphitrite, his wife. Up above them are female representations of the four points of the compass, while slender turrets and Expressionistic carvings playfully decorate the walls. It’s now the five-star hotel Amrath, but you can pop in for a drink in its bar for a glimpse of the interior, which here at least has been well preserved.
The Old Centre | Nieuwmarkt and around |
Kloveniersburgwal
Heading south along Kloveniersburgwal from Nieuwmarkt, it’s a short hoof to the Trippenhuis at no. 29, an overblown mansion complete with Corinthian pilasters and a grand frieze