Leidseplein: Stadsschouwburg & American Hotel
Why is it significant?
Stand in the middle of Leidseplein and turn slowly on your heel. Trams squeal round the curve, a street performer gathers a crowd, café terraces spill across the cobbles, and two buildings refuse to be ignored: the red-brick city theatre, the Stadsschouwburg, with its grand balcony, and across the…
Key Facts
| Place | Leidseplein: Stadsschouwburg & American Hotel |
|---|---|
| Address | Leidseplein 26, 1017 PT Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36440, 4.88190 |
| Part of Walk | Amsterdam's Green Heart: Vondelpark, Oud-Zuid and the Concertgebouw |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the middle of Leidseplein and turn slowly on your heel. Trams squeal round the curve, a street performer gathers a crowd, café terraces spill across the cobbles, and two buildings refuse to be ignored: the red-brick city theatre, the Stadsschouwburg, with its grand balcony, and across the water the American Hotel, a brick castle with a clock tower.
The square is named after a gate. Until 1862 the Leidsepoort stood here, the city gate on the road to Leiden, and beyond the moat lay meadows, ditches and windmills. Travellers coming in from the west left their carts and horses on this open ground, because the narrow streets inside were no place for them. So one of the busiest squares in Europe began life, more or less, as a car park for horses.
The theatre has a dramatic past of its own. Its wooden predecessor burned to the ground in 1890, and the building you see opened in 1894. But Amsterdam's stage tradition is much older: in 1638 the first city theatre opened on the Keizersgracht with a new play by Joost van den Vondel. Remember that name... you will meet him in bronze very soon. And that balcony? When Ajax wins a title, the players walk out onto it to face a square packed with fans in red and white.
The American Hotel took its present shape in 1902, designed by Willem Kromhout, and inherited its name from an earlier hotel on the same spot. On its ground floor, Café Américain is one of the most elegant historic café rooms in the city, all high arches, stained glass and lamplight, where writers, artists and actors have lingered over coffee for more than a century.
Just behind the hotel runs the Singelgracht, the outermost moat of the seventeenth-century city. For two hundred years that water was the edge of Amsterdam. Everything you will see on this walk, the park, the villas, the museums, the concert hall, rose on former meadowland after the city finally outgrew its walls. Now walk a few steps south, past the casino, into a small square where the chess pieces are almost as tall as children.