Amsterdam Centraal: The Palace That Hid the Harbour
Why is it significant?
Stand at the eastern end of the station square and take in the whole length of it: red brick, gilded details, a long row of arches and, rising in the middle, two towers. Look carefully at their faces. One tells the time.
Key Facts
| Place | Amsterdam Centraal: The Palace That Hid the Harbour |
|---|---|
| Address | Stationsplein, 1012 AB Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.37880, 4.90200 |
| Part of Walk | Ships, Silos and a Red Python: Modern Architecture of Amsterdam's Eastern Docklands |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the eastern end of the station square and take in the whole length of it: red brick, gilded details, a long row of arches and, rising in the middle, two towers. Look carefully at their faces. One tells the time. The other, the story goes, was set up to show the direction of the wind, which mattered a great deal in a city that still thought like a port.
The architect was Pierre Cuypers, the same man who designed the Rijksmuseum, and if the two buildings look like cousins, that is no accident. Work began in 1882 and the station opened on the fifteenth of October 1889. But the most remarkable thing about it is underneath your feet. The whole station stands on three artificial islands made in the water of the IJ, held up by 8,687 wooden piles driven into the mud.
And not everyone was pleased. Putting the station here meant building a wall between Amsterdam and its own waterfront, the harbour that had made the city rich. Local critics called it an attack on the beauty of the capital. The national government pushed it through anyway, and Amsterdam, which had always faced the water, suddenly turned its back on it.
The harbour simply moved east. In the late nineteenth century, new docks and long piers were dug and dredged out there, for steamships sailing to the Dutch East Indies, South America and the Mediterranean. A century later the ships had grown too big and the containers had gone elsewhere, and those empty piers became one of the boldest experiments in housing and architecture in Europe. That is where this walk is going.
So think of this station as the starting gun. Walk east along the water, past the bicycle parking and the ferries, towards a large, pale, boxy building on the island across the Oosterdok. It holds more books than anywhere else in the city.