Westerpark
Why is it significant?
Follow the path along the pond and listen: somewhere beyond the trees on your right, a train is almost certainly rumbling past. That sound has been part of this place for longer than the park itself.
Key Facts
| Place | Westerpark |
|---|---|
| Address | Westerpark, Haarlemmerweg, 1014 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.38620, 4.87720 |
| Part of Walk | Red Brick Dreams: Amsterdam School, Het Schip & the Western Islands |
| Generated | Generated |
Follow the path along the pond and listen: somewhere beyond the trees on your right, a train is almost certainly rumbling past. That sound has been part of this place for longer than the park itself.
The railway embankment to the north carries the descendant of the very first railway in the Netherlands. On the twentieth of September 1839 a train pulled by a locomotive called De Arend, the Eagle, ran from Haarlem to Amsterdam. Its Amsterdam terminus stood just outside the gate you have just seen, and it was called Willemspoort station. Imagine the crowds on the dike, half thrilled and half sure the passengers would suffocate at such speed.
The park came later, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and it came out of necessity. Under the city's expansion plan of 1877, drawn up by the engineer Jan Kalff, Amsterdam burst out beyond its canals for the first time in two hundred years. Much of what was built was speculative and shoddy, thrown up fast for profit. Amsterdammers had a sour name for it: revolutiebouw, revolution building, not because of politics but because it went up at revolutionary speed. Families crammed into damp rooms, sometimes in basements below the water line. A park was the least the city could offer the people of these new districts.
And here is the twist that sets up everything you will see next. Disgust at those slums led to the Housing Act of 1901, the Woningwet, which allowed councils and non-profit housing associations to build decent homes for working people with public money. It took a few years, and the First World War, before the money flowed. But when it did, it landed in the hands of a group of young architects who believed a worker deserved beauty as much as a banker.
Keep heading west through the park, towards the long red brick halls rising beyond the trees. Ahead is a factory that once lit the whole city.