Amsterdam is a picturesque city poised in a unique waterscape

Posted in Geography, Historical articles, History on Wednesday, 29 January 2014

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This edited article about Amsterdam first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 531 published on 18 March 1972.

Amsterdam,  picture, image, illustration

Photographic view on the Chief Canal in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam

It is impossible to think of Holland without thinking of water. The old Dutch saying “God made the oceans, man makes the shore” is no joke. For centuries the Dutch have been changing the outline of their country, pushing back the sea, strengthening the swampy edges of the land, building dikes and bridges. Where the water could not be conquered completely, they disciplined it into canals.

Nowhere is the proverb truer than in the capital, Amsterdam. Even today she has well over 400 bridges, connecting a hundred islands. Back in the 16th century the great Dutch scholar Erasmus called her “the city where people live like crows on the tops of trees,” for the entire town was built on piles driven into a sandy marsh. Much of the land round about was actually below sea-level.

Out of this unpromising material the Dutch built one of the most attractive, as well as one of the most prosperous, cities in Europe.

She stands now within a stone’s throw of the Ijsselmeer, a sizeable arm of the North Sea. It was not always so. The Ijsselmeer is the youngest “sea” in the world. It was formed only about 600 years ago, when the water finally burst over the “lip” of Holland on to the low-lying plain to the north-east of Amsterdam. It swept away whole villages, drowned whole farms and the people living and working on them. It came almost to the doorsteps of Amsterdam herself.

Ever since, the stubborn Dutch have been planning and working to push it all back where it came from. In some places they have already succeeded.

In a curious way the disaster may have been the making of Amsterdam, for in the middle of the 13th century the local lord, Gisbertus, threw a dam across the mouth of the river Amstel (which split the stripling city in two) to keep the water back. On that dam, today, stands the city’s main square: Dam Square. The name Amsterdam itself commemorates the event.

Her prosperity as a commercial city began a century later, when she joined the Hanseatic League. This was a trading-union of northern-European towns. It began in the 12th century, when the Crusades set people moving restlessly over Europe, carrying trade with them. Groups of shrewd merchants, anxious to “cash in” on the new business, formed hansa (associations) to secure its control.

As time went on individual hansa united. By the 14th century the League was equal in power, and more than equal in wealth, to many European states. It even had its own army.

From the time she joined it, Amsterdam began to flourish. By the 15th century she was one of the most important trading centres of Europe. She profited from other people’s tribulations. Her own people were tolerant, and compassionate. So, when religious or racial prejudice threatened, refugees flocked to her protecting arms.

When Belgium fell into Spanish hands, merchants flooded in from Antwerp, bringing their own trading skills. Huguenots came from France. Jews came from everywhere, with their financial expertise. Amsterdam became the banking centre of the world. In her workshops a fortune in diamonds flashed and sparkled under the hands of skilled cutters.

To protect her growing wealth walls, moats, bastions and towers girdled the city. Inside them the affluent merchants planned, and built, much of the “old” Amsterdam we see today.

On a street map it looks as though someone jabbed the point of a pair of compasses into the place where the Central Station now stands, and drew a series of ever-increasing semi-circles. These are the canals. Lines, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, radiate across them. These are the streets.

The canals are spanned by bridges carrying the roads and lanes. No other city, anywhere in the world, has so many. Bridges with evocative names: Narrow Bridge and High Lock; and tantalising names: Milkmaid’s Bridge, Ogre’s Lock, Biscuit Bridge and Tasty Lock, which suggest stories long forgotten.

The cobbled banks of the main canals (“Gentlemen’s”, “Emperor’s” and “Prince’s”) are shaded by long rows of elm and linden trees. Set back from the water’s edge are Amsterdam’s pride, the merchants’ houses.

These were also their warehouses and offices. Set high in each gable is a huge hook. On these the valuable merchandise was hauled to the upper storey for safety, guarded by the merchant’s family who lived on the lower floors.

Only a few of them are private houses still. Some are museums, like the house where Rembrandt lived and painted. Even those turned into offices though are protected, their lovely painted walls, carved staircases, panelled rooms and plastered ceilings carefully preserved.

As the port became busier, and wealthier, the city gradually spread outwards, fanwise. Dignified municipal buildings, and churches with tall, bell-hung towers, grew beside the patrician houses. There were little churches too. One of them, which sheltered “illegal” Roman Catholics at the time of the Reformation, was simply the attic floor of an ordinary house. Its pet name was “Our Lord in the Garret.”

Life was not always peaceful. The Low Countries: Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, clamped as they are between France and Germany, all had their share of invasions and domination. Amsterdam saw more than one foreign army, and more than one foreign ruler, in her quiet squares and on her bustling waterways. But nothing seemed seriously to threaten her onward progress.

The tolerance and adaptability of her people were probably partly the reason. They were clever, too, in manipulating the water which was at once their enemy, and their friend. Twice in the 17th century they opened their dikes to keep out unwelcome visitors.

Only once was Amsterdam’s prosperity really threatened, by the progressive silting up of the Ijsselmeer channels. Three big new canals, two to the North Sea, one to the River Rhine, all built in the 19th century, solved that problem.

Until the Second World War the Amsterdammers had not known true oppression for centuries. They even managed to remain neutral during World War One. But the years 1940-45 were dark. Out of a pre-war total of 100,000 Jews barely a tenth of that number remain today. The rest were deported to concentration camps. Many were hidden by friends, for a time at least, and loyally cared for, sometimes for years.

In the last half-century Amsterdam has grown enormously, spreading far outside the medieval boundaries. An “Amsterdam School of Architecture” carefully planned the garden-cities which stand on the outskirts. A forest-park of 2,000 acres where Amsterdammers can escape into the peace of the countryside gave construction work to hundreds during the pre-war Depression. It has 34 miles of bicycle paths, 91 miles of footpaths, an open-air theatre, 37 acres for water-sports, a huge land-sports ground and, in its woodlands, hundreds of different birds and butterflies. The astonishing thing is that all this land lies 12 feet below sea-level.

Amsterdam has sometimes, foolishly, been called “the Venice of the North.” She is nothing of the sort. Amsterdam is herself; a city with a strong, proud character all her own. She is like nowhere else on earth.

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