Amsterdam
Amsterdam historical timeline
History
Amsterdam is a city that began as a piece of water management and never stopped being one. It takes its name from a dam thrown across the Amstel, and the square that dam became is still the centre of the city eight centuries later. Everything a visitor finds characteristic here -- the concentric canals, the narrow brick fronts, the tilt in the houses -- follows from building a capital on drained bog, where land has to be made before it can be sold and nothing heavy can stand without piles driven twenty metres into sand.
Chronology
- The All Saints' Flood reshapes the estuary, and a dam is built in the Amstel. The settlement is named after it, and the dam site is now Dam Square -- the one point in the city that has been the centre continuously since there was a city.
- A document of 27 October, granting toll exemption, gives the oldest surviving mention of Amestelledamme. It is a trade privilege rather than a foundation, which sets the pattern: the place exists in the record because of what it was allowed to ship.
- Gwijde van Henegouwen, bishop of Utrecht, grants city rights. The town gains the power to govern and to wall itself, and the line of that early perimeter is still legible in the curve of the innermost canals.
- The second of two great fires destroys three quarters of the city, and Emperor Charles decrees that new houses be built of stone. That single order is why the centre reads as brick rather than timber, and why almost nothing wooden survives above ground.
- The States General amalgamates the existing trading companies into the Dutch East India Company on 20 March, with Amsterdam as its principal chamber. Shares can be bought by any citizen and resold in the open-air markets. The money that follows is what pays for everything built in the next century -- and for a colonial and slave-trading system the city ran at a distance.
- The canal ring is begun: three concentric residential arcs -- Herengracht, Keizersgracht, Prinsengracht -- with the Singelgracht outside them for defence and water management, and the Jordaan's parallel cuts for moving goods. It is a single planned expansion, and it is the shape a visitor walks through today.
- French armies arrive and the Republic ends; the kingdom follows in 1815. Amsterdam keeps its financial weight but loses its political centrality, and the long stagnation that follows is the reason the seventeenth-century fabric survived instead of being replaced.
- Centraal Station opens across the head of the IJ. It gives the city its rail connection and simultaneously walls it off from its own harbour -- the reason Amsterdam turns its back on the water it was built to reach.
- The Afsluitdijk is completed, closing the Zuiderzee. Amsterdam is cut off from the open sea for the first time in its history and the water on its northern edge becomes fresh, which ends the city's life as a sea port and begins Rotterdam's dominance.
- German forces occupy the city. Three quarters of the Netherlands' Jewish population is killed over the following five years, and Amsterdam's Jewish quarter -- the densest in the country -- does not recover. The Anne Frank House on the Prinsengracht is one hiding place among many, preserved rather than reconstructed.
What survived, and how
Amsterdam's seventeenth-century centre survives largely because the city became poor and stayed poor for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There was no money to replace the canal houses, and by the time there was, in the boom at the end of the nineteenth century, the expansion went outside the Singelgracht instead. The UNESCO inscription of 2010 covers exactly that: not individual buildings, but the canal ring as one continuous piece of urban planning.
What survives is not stable, though, and the threat is underneath. The houses stand on timber piles that last indefinitely while submerged and rot when the water table drops, which is why the city holds each district at its own fixed water level and why leaning frontages are a maintenance problem rather than a charm. The quay walls along the canals are in places four hundred years old and have begun to fail; a renewal programme running to 2040 is rebuilding them, which is the reason a visitor will find stretches of canal fenced off and a crane standing in the water.