Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [36]
The Old Centre | Nieuwmarkt and around |
St Antoniesbreestraat
You can cut through from the Zuiderkerk to St Antoniesbreestraat, which once linked the city centre with the Jewish Quarter. Its huddle of shops and houses was mostly demolished in the 1980s to make way for a main road, but the plan was subsequently abandoned; the buildings that now line most of the street hardly fire the soul, even if the modern symmetries – and cubist, coloured panels – of the apartment blocks that sprawl along part of the street are visually arresting. One of the few survivors of all these municipal shenanigans is the Pintohuis (Mon & Wed 2–8pm, Fri 2–5pm, Sat 11am–4pm; free), at no. 69, which is now a public library. Easily spotted by its off-white Italianate facade, the mansion is named after Isaac de Pinto, a Jew who fled Portugal to escape the Inquisition and subsequently became a founder of the Dutch East India Company. Pinto bought this property in 1651 and promptly had it remodelled in grand style, with a facade interrupted by six lofty pilasters which lead the eye up to the blind balustrade. The mansion was the talk of the town, even more so when de Pinto had the interior painted in a similar style to the exterior – pop in to look at the birds and cherubs of the original painted ceiling.
The Zuiderkerk
The Grachtengordel
The western reaches of medieval Amsterdam were once enclosed by the Singel, part of the city’s protective moat, but this is now just the first of five canals that stretch right around the city centre, extending anticlockwise from Brouwersgracht to the River Amstel in a “girdle of canals”, or Grachtengordel. This is without doubt the most charming part of Amsterdam, a lattice of olive-green waterways and dinky humpback bridges overlooked by street upon street of handsome seventeenth-century canal houses, almost invariably undisturbed by later development. Of the three main canals, Herengracht (Gentlemen’s Canal) was the first to be dug, followed by Keizersgracht (Emperor’s Canal), named after the Holy Roman Emperor and fifteenth-century patron of the city, Maximilian. Further out still is Prinsengracht, Princes’ Canal, named in honour of the princes of the House of Orange. North of Leidsegracht, the main canals are intersected by a pattern of cross-streets, eminently appealing shopping streets, where you can buy everything from carpets and handmade chocolates to designer toothbrushes and beeswax candles – all in all Amsterdam at its creative, imaginative best.
It’s also a subtle cityscape – full of surprises, with a bizarre carving here, an unusual facade stone (used to denote name and occupation) there – and one in which the gables overlooking the canals gradually evolved. The earliest, dating from the early seventeenth century, are crow-stepped gables, but these were largely superseded from the 1650s onwards by neck gables and bell gables, both named for the shape of the gable top. Some are embellished, many have decorative cornices, and the fanciest – which mostly date from the eighteenth century – sport full-scale balustrades. The plainest gables are those of former warehouses, where the deep-arched and shuttered windows line up on either side of loft doors that were once used for loading and unloading goods, winched by pulley from the street down below. Indeed, outside pulleys remain a common feature of houses and warehouses alike, and are often still in use as the easiest way of moving furniture into the city’s myriad apartments.
The grandest Grachtengordel houses are concentrated along the so-called De Gouden Bocht – the Golden Bend – on Herengracht between Leidsestraat and the Amstel. Here, the architectural decorum – and arguably the aesthetic vigour – of the seventeenth century are left behind for the overblown, French-influenced mansions that became popular with the city’s richest merchants in the 1700s. Nevertheless, it is perhaps the district’s laid-back, easygoing atmosphere