Haarlemmerdijk: The Old Dyke Road to Haarlem
Why is it significant?
Stand in the middle of the Haarlemmerdijk for a moment, between the bicycles and the shop windows, and notice how straight and slightly raised this street feels.
Key Facts
| Place | Haarlemmerdijk: The Old Dyke Road to Haarlem |
|---|---|
| Address | Haarlemmerdijk 1, 1013 KA Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.38160, 4.88890 |
| Part of Walk | Behind the Green Doors: Hidden Hofjes and Market Days of the Jordaan, Amsterdam |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the middle of the Haarlemmerdijk for a moment, between the bicycles and the shop windows, and notice how straight and slightly raised this street feels. Cheese shops, bakeries, little design stores, people with flowers in their bicycle baskets... it looks like the friendliest high street in Amsterdam. But the name gives it away. Dijk means dyke.
Long before there were shops here, this was a sea wall. The IJ, the broad water that was Amsterdam's harbour, came right up to its northern side, and the dyke kept the waves out of the fields behind it. On top ran the road west, towards Haarlem. When the city exploded outwards in the early seventeenth century, the dyke was simply swallowed by the new streets and became one of them.
And this road was the start of something modern. In 1631 a straight canal was dug from the city gate at the end of this street to Haarlem, a trekvaart, and horses on the towpath pulled passenger barges along it. They left at fixed hours, rain or shine, so regularly that historians see it as an early form of the public transport timetable. You could read, sleep or argue about religion all the way to Haarlem.
Two centuries later the same route got the next big idea. In September 1839 the first railway in the Netherlands opened between Amsterdam and Haarlem, and its Amsterdam terminus stood just outside the gate at the end of this street. Barge, then steam train... the Haarlemmerdijk has always been the way out of town.
Now, the Jordaan proper begins a little to the south, across the Brouwersgracht. But the people who built it, the carpenters, the dyers, the immigrants and the poor, walked this dyke every day, and the first secret of their neighbourhood is hiding just around the corner. Turn left, cross the Brouwersgracht by one of its bridges, and find the quiet little Palmgracht just beyond.