Amsterdam

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Koninklijk Paleis 1,500 points

  Go in and look down. The world is laid into the floor of the main hall in marble, both halves of it, and nobody stops you walking across the lot. Best surface in this level, and I do not say that lightly.

• Amsterdam Museum 500 points

  One outer wall is set with row upon row of carved house stones, taken off buildings that no longer exist. Each was an address back when addresses had no numbers. Rescued stone. I am always in favour.

• Nieuwe Kerk 500 points

  Kings are sworn in here. That happens perhaps twice in a lifetime, so most of the year the doors are open for something else entirely. Come at it from a side lane. The face it turns to the big open space is not its front.

• Oude Kerk 500 points

  Two lanes lead in to it, one named narrow and one named wide, and both names are accurate. Little houses are built hard against the outside, leaning on it the way something grows on a stone. Go all the way around it before you go in.

• Begijnhofkapel 250 points

  The way in is one low door off the lane, and it is easy to walk straight past it. Behind the door the noise stops dead. A quiet lawn, buildings facing inward all the way round it, in the middle of the busiest part of town. Push.

• Munttoren 250 points

  The south corner, where the ring of water closes on itself. It is on a traffic island now, so you go round it rather than past it. On the hour the bells up there play, and it is more than one note. Stop for it.

• Nieuwmarkt 250 points

  The eastern corner of this level, and the point where the old moat turns. Something out in the open draws every eye. Turn your back on it and look at the edges. Streets come in from all sides, and one of them is a sea dike that has not seen the sea in a very long time.

• Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder 250 points

  You get in from the water side now, through a plain door across the lane, and then you walk under the street. The city once had dozens of places like this, kept out of sight because the rules of the day wanted them out of sight. This is the one still standing.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

A low, wet, unpromising spot where the Amstel runs out into the IJ. Before 1270 a connected line of dikes was standing, and a dam lay across the river exactly where the Dam is now. A dam means every cargo has to come out of one boat and into another. A place where everything is put down and picked up again turns into a market on its own. I have a lot of time for a town founded on making people stop.

Sources: maps.amsterdam.nl p. 7

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

1275–1578

Whoever held the county of Holland held this place. On 27 October 1275 Count Floris V let the people at the dam off the toll on his rivers, and that is the first time the name turns up in writing at all. Town rights came around 1300. A century and a half later the man in charge was a duke of Burgundy, handing out tax relief. The title kept changing. The address never did: somewhere else.

Sources: openresearch.amsterdam, maps.amsterdam.nl p. 7, openresearch.amsterdam p. 3

1578–1795

Then the city's own council. In 1578, at the change of government called the Alteratie, it went over from Catholic to Protestant, and the town started growing again. What got built next says what that council cared about: an exchange in 1585, a bank in 1609, a corn exchange in 1617. Four street names on this level still carry the first of them. All three houses existed to make goods move faster. My whole project is the opposite of that.

Sources: maps.amsterdam.nl p. 8

1795–

Then a country decided. After 1795 the decisions moved to a national government and stayed there. The French years were lean: the Continental System took the trade away, and between 1795 and 1815 the city shrank to about 180,000 people. What Amsterdam kept was the title. The constitution still calls it the capital, and the government sits in a different town altogether. A capital nobody governs from is a quiet capital. Suits me.

Sources: maps.amsterdam.nl p. 13, wetten.overheid.nl

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. The ground under you did not grow here, it was carried here. People raised their own house plots, one at a time, along both banks of the Amstel, until the separate heaps ran together into two long ribbons. The two river dikes along those same banks are Warmoesstraat and Nieuwendijk now, and that is where the merchants and the skippers sat. Somebody moved all of that by the basket. I take it as a compliment.

   Sources: maps.amsterdam.nl p. 7

2. In 1452 about three quarters of the town burned down. The ruler let the citizens off their taxes, but only if they rebuilt with brick side walls and hard roofing instead of reed, and a by-law of 31 May 1452 banned timber side walls outright. They went on building in wood anyway. Brick only really spread from 1521, seventy years later. That is how fast a city takes a hint.

   Sources: openresearch.amsterdam p. 1, openresearch.amsterdam p. 3

3. This level has a hard edge, and the edge is from 1425. In that year the city dug three new defensive moats as part of an extension: the Singel to the west, and the Kloveniersburgwal and the Geldersekade to the east. In 1481 a brick wall five to six metres high went up along them and closed the lot in. The wall is gone, the water is not. So the shape you walk today was drawn by people worrying about who might show up.

   Sources: openresearch.amsterdam

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 163streets
• 1,636dots
• 26.8km of street
• 33.2km on foot
• 9.5hours at a stroll