Gerard Douplein: Painters' Streets and the Baker Who Saved De Pijp
Why is it significant?
Pull up a mental chair on this little square: café terraces under the trees, bicycles leaning on every pole, and tall narrow houses of dark brick rising on all sides. It feels like a village green. Yet a hundred and fifty years ago this was a muddy building site on the edge of a city in a hurry.
Key Facts
| Place | Gerard Douplein: Painters' Streets and the Baker Who Saved De Pijp |
|---|---|
| Address | Gerard Douplein, 1072 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.35600, 4.89320 |
| Part of Walk | Herring, Stroopwafels and Roti: A Food Walk Through Amsterdam's De Pijp |
| Generated | Generated |
Pull up a mental chair on this little square: café terraces under the trees, bicycles leaning on every pole, and tall narrow houses of dark brick rising on all sides. It feels like a village green. Yet a hundred and fifty years ago this was a muddy building site on the edge of a city in a hurry.
Look at the street signs around you and you are walking through a museum catalogue. Gerard Dou, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Van Ostade, Van der Helst... the planners named De Pijp after the painters of the Golden Age. Gerard Dou was Rembrandt's first pupil in Leiden, and he became a master of tiny, polished scenes painted with brushes of only a few hairs. Legend says he would sit and wait for the dust to settle before he dared to touch the paint. In his own lifetime he was one of the best-paid painters in the country.
The houses, though, were not built with that kind of care. From the 1870s speculators put up long, narrow blocks as fast and as cheaply as they could, to house the workers flooding into the city. Some say the long straight streets reminded people of pipes, which is one explanation for the name De Pijp... nobody really knows. By the 1960s many of these homes were damp and crumbling, and the city drew up plans to tear large parts of the neighbourhood down.
That is where a pastry baker comes into the story. Jan Schaefer, a baker turned community activist, helped the residents fight off the large-scale demolition, and later became the city's alderman for housing, from 1978 to 1986. His most famous line, in Amsterdam slang, means roughly: you cannot live in hot air. Instead of bulldozers, De Pijp got renewal block by block, and the people stayed.
They were joined by students, artists, and newcomers from Suriname, Turkey and Morocco, which is why this is still the most crowded, noisiest and tastiest corner of Amsterdam. Head back down to the market and turn left, east, along the stalls... and follow the smell of warm syrup.