Lloyd Hotel: The Emigrants' Hotel
Why is it significant?
Take a good look at the handsome brick building on the quay, with its sturdy tower and rows of regular windows. It looks solid, respectable, a little old-fashioned. Few buildings in Amsterdam have lived as many lives as this one.
Key Facts
| Place | Lloyd Hotel: The Emigrants' Hotel |
|---|---|
| Address | Oostelijke Handelskade 34, 1019 BN Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.37420, 4.93480 |
| Part of Walk | Ships, Silos and a Red Python: Modern Architecture of Amsterdam's Eastern Docklands |
| Generated | Generated |
Take a good look at the handsome brick building on the quay, with its sturdy tower and rows of regular windows. It looks solid, respectable, a little old-fashioned. Few buildings in Amsterdam have lived as many lives as this one.
It was built between 1918 and 1921 to a design by the architect Evert Breman, for the shipping company Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd, whose ships sailed to South America. The company needed somewhere to keep its third-class passengers together until their ship was ready, so it built its own hotel on the quay. It was a hotel, but not a luxury one. From 1921 to 1936 it housed emigrants waiting for their ship, most of them poor Jewish families from Eastern Europe, hoping for a new life across the Atlantic. They washed, ate and slept here, sometimes for weeks, before stepping straight from this quay onto the boat.
Then the story darkens. From 1938 the building sheltered Jewish refugees from Germany. During the Second World War it was used as a detention centre. After the war it became a prison, and from 1963 a detention centre for young offenders, until it closed in 1989, run down and half-forgotten.
What saved it was art. From 1989 artists moved in, among them artists from the former Yugoslavia, and the old cells became studios. In 2001 it was listed as a monument, and in 2004 it reopened as the Lloyd Hotel after a restoration by the architects MVRDV, with rooms ranging from very simple to very grand, as if echoing the very different people who had passed through. After another renovation it reopened as a hotel once more in 2023.
Stand still for a moment and imagine the quay a hundred years ago: trunks, children, a ship's horn, people leaving everything behind. Then walk east along the quay towards Sporenburg, the long peninsula where Amsterdam tried something completely new with the ordinary terraced house.