Juffrouw Jo

On a lucky day, you may come accross Miss Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse on her stroll through Amsterdam. It is easy enough to spot her. Always and everywhere, she wears period clothing from the 1930s and 1940s (see for yourself in her photostream).
Juffrouw Jo is not alone: there are 80 members and counting in her Club Interbellum.
Jo's years long passion for this historical period eventually led her to invent a dream job for herself. For 10 years already, Jo has been advising clients - film producers, theatres, museums, schools... - on how to visually and otherwise correctly recreate this historical period.
The above photographs feature the interior of Jo's Advising Buro 30-45 that can be found in Amsterdam (Oost) at Tweede Boerhaavenstraat 71-2. The buro also doubles as a WW2 apartment (still in the works): before it is finished, it can be rented as a film location at a reduced fee. The Amsterdamse School furniture originates from the 1920s, the radio from the 1930s, and the magazines from the 1940s.
In the apartment, it is still war.
The year is 1943.

De Batavier outdoor library

This library of 250 ceramic books in the facade of De Batavier was created by Sanja Medić, an artist resident in Amsterdam. It was commissioned by the housing organisation De Alliantie and HVDN Architects in the process of developing a new residential building in Lootsstraat in Amsterdam.
The streets in this neighbourhood in Oud West are named after the Dutch poets and writers, and the titles on the spines of the books are taken from the works of these same authors.

Oerol

We are now a mere week away from Oerol. During Oerol, the entire Frisian island of Terschelling is turned into an off-Broadway stage with a circus atmosphere. Nomadic old-fashioned caravans of art troupes, and an odd art installation here and there, are scattered amidst the grazing sheep and horses. You will find actors on the beach, in the dunes and even in your room or tent.
Act normally. People may otherwise mistake you for an act. They might sit down in a circle around you and wait for your next move.
Bring a hat.

Vanished Amsterdam

Jodenbreestraat in the 1940s, with the Rembrandt's house at the right corner

You can stroll through the old center of Amsterdam this very evening, and realise somewhere along the way that you might just as well be strolling through 17th or 18th century Amsterdam. Unless you are strolling through the area of the old Jewish district, that is: on Waterlooplein, in the Jodenbreestraat or on Nieuwmarkt.
Let's say you are.
The year is 1930. The old Jewish district has over centuries past developed a special and distinct atmosphere. The inhabitants are extremely poor here, but the street life is all the more colourful for that. Jews are everywhere. They represent about 13 per cent of the Amsterdam population, and many of them live in this very area. By now, Jews have been living in Amsterdam for over 400 years and as much as 90 per cent of the population in this area are Jewish. The wealthy Jews live along the nearby canals and in the Plantage neighbourhood, but they are really all over the city. After all, half of the stalls on the Albert Cuypmarkt are Jewish. As are all the big department stores: the Bijenkorf, Metz & Co, Maison De Bonneterie..., and the atmospheric Tuschinski movie theatre.
You are therefore strolling through the heart of Mokum: for the year is 1930 and the city is still Jewish. This is the Jerusalem of the West. It is here that the main European synagogues were built. And above all, this is where there has always been a large open-air market with stalls. That's why you are here, and you are here every weekend. You know that in the old days the fish market was held along the Houtgracht canal, the vegetable market beside the Mozes and Aaron Church, and the hay market along the Leprozengracht: the canal of the lepers.


Leprozengracht canal with view of the Mozes and Aaron Church, prior to the creation of the Waterlooplein square

In 1882, however, both canals were filled up and turned into a huge windy Waterlooplein square. At the time of your stroll, there is no opera house on the square yet. It's just a large, open square full of stalls. You were also strolling here two days ago, on Friday morning, when the stalls were only being prepared. It really looked exactly like Sani van Bossum vividly described:
“Friday morning in the wee small hours, people are putting up stalls… there’s so much to be done. The boards must be laid out across the packing cases, and the baskets must be lined with clean newspaper, the fruit must be arranged attractively, so that the oranges whose scent wafting towards you makes your heart lift, stand out among the luxuriant bunches of grapes and the soft blushing peaches. Glory be, what a display! It’s a work of art! The passers-by have to stop and gaze and their shopping baskets open of their own accord and their mouths begin to water and out comes their money. Then they buy this and that and the stallholders have a blessed Friday with enough money earned by the end of the day to make a good Shabbat!”



2011 Exhibition on Waterlooplein of the former Jewish market at Waterlooplein

Now let's go back to 2011. Where in 1930 there was a huge Jewish bazaar, there is now no bazaar and there are no Jews. Even the large market square is gone.
“I see my shadow dancing on the stalls,” Ed Hoornik, a Dutch poet, prophetically wrote in 1938. “The train to Berlin only takes ten hours.”
Only four years later, the train with number 11537 began regularly transporting Jews to Westerbork, from where they were taken on to the extermination camps. Abram Icek Tuschinski was one of them.


The demarcation of the Jewish Ghetto in Amsterdam in the 1940s, at Nieuwmarkt

This regular train line was cancelled in September 1943. It was no longer needed.
For nearly a year, the old Jewish district lay dormant and silent, a ghostly city within a city. Finally, in the hungry and cold winter of 1944/45, Amsterdammers looted the district in droves and destroyed even what little there was left of it.
So the 5,000 surviving Jewish Amsterdammers (out of 80,000), in 1945, had no home whatsoever to return to.
In the absence of Jews who co-created this city over the centuries, their shadows are everywhere. Many streets still bear Jewish names. The particular slang of Amsterdammers still uses Yiddish words. Amsterdammers still refer to Amsterdam as Mokum. Mokum... the Yiddish name that was lovingly given to the city by the Jewish Amsterdammers: 'the place'.

Admiral Benbow Inn

In ‘t Aepjen is a remnant of the time when Zeedijk was a sea wall, protecting Amsterdam from the Zuiderzee. The sea is now long gone, but the old sailors’ tavern survived where even sea couldn’t.

Upon entering, one cannot help but scan the inn for Long John Silver and his parrot…
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Everywhere, there are references to monkeys (aepjen is an old Dutch word for 'a monkey'). In its sea-faring days, the tavern was swarming with monkeys that the sailors brought from their voyages. Monkeys were the seamen's currency: this is how seamen, when down on their luck, paid the inn-keeper for the lodgings.

And seamen certainly were down on their luck. To enlist on the ship headed for the East Indies was tentamount to suicide. “The recruiting of hands for the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) ships,” writes Geert Mak, “was usually carried out by so-called zielverkopers or ‘soul merchants’. These plucked men off the streets and provided them with food and shelter until such time as the VOC made it known, amid much drumming and trumpeting, that it needed men. The soul merchants then put down the names of their ‘guests’ as crew and pocketed most of the premium as payment for their lodging.” Between 1700 and 1800, a total of 671,000 men set sail for East Indies. Of these, only 266,000 returned.

In ‘t Aepjen is one of precious few reminders left to us of that old, sea-faring Amsterdam. At Zeedijk number 1, this is the first inn that the seamen would stumble against, on their way from the harbour. Every single one of them, ever since 1560, must have walked in for a drink at least once.

On the odd Saturday, old sea chanties are still being sung here. An adventurous soul can still take up lodgings in the rooms above (via the Barbizon). If traveling with monkeys, please contact the inn-keeper for the exchange rate.

Aemstelredamme

Amstelredamum, Nobile Inferioris Germaniae Oppidum
Map Maker: Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg (1572, Cologne)


A view of Amsterdam from IJ, drawn by Pieter van der Keere (1618)


Crane booms, drawn by J.C. Greive Jr. (1850-1860)

EVEN AS LATE AS 1880, a traveler would enter Amsterdam through a harbour. The harbour stretched out over some three kilometres exactly where the Centraal Station now stands. Alongside this slowly curving bay, in the words of Geert Mak, a complete waterscape with a forest of masts, flags, towers and big wooden wharfs (for constructing ships) had come into being, subdivided by pontoons.

“This waterscape,” explains Mak, “had a structure of its own, and there were even a number of buildings on stilts seemingly lost amid the ships: shipping offices, a platform on which there were two wooden cranes, guardhouses, dredging mills, the “tree bell” which was sounded each evening when the booms were lowered to close the city’s access to the sea […] and finally a special inn, a substantial wooden building catering to those foreigners who were not permitted to enter the city.”

If the traveler was permitted to enter the city, he would continue to sail or row himself into Damrak. The cargo was rowed ashore from the larger vessels, while smaller ships took their cargo and passengers on to the Dam. Damrak canal that ran through the spot where the National Monument stands was, too, full of ships.


River Amstel flowing through Damrak (cca 1690)

This is how you should start exploring Amsterdam. Draw in your mind the contours of the city walls and erase the Centraal Station. Imagine you are sailing into the city from the IJ. As you walk along the streets, fill them up in your mind with water and let your imagination sail you along the narrow streets that were once much wider canals. Start at Zeedijk number 1, where In 't Aepjen - an old sailors’ tavern, one of only two remaining timber houses - still stands at your service with a bottle of whisky and a lodging room. Then sail on and pass those windows with red lights… only imagine the ladies dressed, and holding a red lantern... luring you on, into a narrower, darker canal… Their teeth sizzling white in the glow of the red lantern, against the absolute pitch darkness of the nights in the Amsterdam of old.

Gem Guide to Amsterdam

A new feature is to be added to Gem: a guide to the gems hidden in Amsterdam. We still need to figure out the best way to work the Gem Guide feature into the blog's interface. Until then, you will be able to find the posts logged under this feature by searching this blog for 'Gem Guide to Amsterdam'.
By way of announcement: we begin with...
RUTGER HAUER!
The photos above were taken amidst a lazy stroll through Cultuurpark Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam (in September of 2009). It wasn't me personally who took the pictures: I was standing next to the photographer. When these pictures were taken I was roughly in the state of a wooden sculpture. Blade Runner has always been larger than life for me, and Rutger Hauer an icon that simply could not be imagined roaming among us. At first, he got distracted by the sounds of our camera, and then he rested his gaze on me.
(Oh bloody wow)
Not a muscle moved in response.
Hence that smile.
Later that evening, we went for dinner at Rainarai - a restaurant at the edge of the Westergasfabriek area dedicated to the 'nomadic kitchen from Algeria'.
"Just imagine..." teased the man who dared to photograph Rutger Hauer. "Imagine that... this... Floris guy... what's his name again... imagine that he comes here... If he would, I'd ask him to sing for you."

Rutger Hauer as Floris van Rosemondt

The dialogue went on, but this is the last bit I remember. Because only a little while later I indeed spotted Rutger Hauer smoking in the front yard of the restaurant.


The front yard, as photographed earlier that same day

My date did not believe it until Rutger Hauer walked through the door. If until this moment the Dutch people spoke of anything unusual, they stopped and started speaking of everyday things instead. This probably serves as a Dutch courtesy and a sign of respect.
How could anyone blend in with THAT?
Not only did he eat in Rainarai, he also sat at the neighbouring table, AND behind me. Twice, he went out for a smoke, and each time he apologized to me for walking accross my table.
Yes, you read that right.
Rutger Hauer stood on top of my table.