Sarphatipark: The Doctor Who Baked the City's Bread
Why is it significant?
Follow the path through the park to the little hill with the fountain on it: a tall stone monument, water splashing into basins, and at its heart a bust of a bearded man. Ducks on the pond, children on the grass, a dog chasing nothing in particular.
Key Facts
| Place | Sarphatipark: The Doctor Who Baked the City's Bread |
|---|---|
| Address | Sarphatipark, 1073 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.35450, 4.89560 |
| Part of Walk | Herring, Stroopwafels and Roti: A Food Walk Through Amsterdam's De Pijp |
| Generated | Generated |
Follow the path through the park to the little hill with the fountain on it: a tall stone monument, water splashing into basins, and at its heart a bust of a bearded man. Ducks on the pond, children on the grass, a dog chasing nothing in particular. It is the calmest spot in De Pijp, and it is named after one of the most restless men Amsterdam ever produced.
Samuel Sarphati was born in 1813 into a Portuguese-Jewish family and trained as a doctor in Leiden. He saw his patients die of cholera and filth, and decided the cure was not in medicine alone. In 1847 he helped get organised waste collection going in the city. He set up a company to bake cheap, honest bread for working families, at a time when bread was dear and often poor. He founded a trade school, built a vast exhibition hall of glass and iron, the Paleis voor Volksvlijt, and dreamed up a grand hotel on the Amstel... where this walk will end.
And this park? In an earlier city plan, this exact spot was meant for a railway station. Instead, nineteen years after Sarphati's death in 1866, the city engineer Jacobus van Niftrik began laying out a romantic English landscape garden of about four and a half hectares, and in 1886 the monument went up in his honour.
There is a dark chapter too. In August 1942 the German occupiers renamed the park, because Sarphati was Jewish, and removed his bust from the monument. On the eighteenth of May 1945, two weeks after liberation, the old name came back and the bust was put back in its place.
A footnote for art lovers: the young Piet Mondriaan lived and painted on the edge of this park for a few years before he left for Paris. Now leave the park on its southern side, cross the busy Ceintuurbaan, and head south into the newer part of De Pijp, towards streets where the brick starts to move.