Behind the Green Doors: Hidden Hofjes and Market Days of the Jordaan, Amsterdam

Secret almshouse courtyards, an eel riot, a cloth market, a mapmaker's lost printing house and the bronze singers of the Jordaan: Amsterdam's working-class quarter, door by door

Amsterdam · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Haarlemmerdijk: The Old Dyke Road to Haarlem

   Haarlemmerdijk 1, 1013 KA Amsterdam, Netherlands

   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.

2. 2. Raepenhofje on the Palmgracht: A Canal With No Water

   Palmgracht 28, 1015 HN Amsterdam, Netherlands

   You are standing on a canal, although there is not a drop of water in sight. This street is the Palmgracht, and gracht means canal. The water was filled in at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Jordaan's narrow canals had become open sewers, and the name simply stayed behind, like a ghost.

   Now look along the row of houses for a plain doorway with a name above it: the Raepenhofje. Behind that door is a hofje, and you need to know the word, because this whole walk is a hunt for them. A hofje is an almshouse built around a hidden courtyard. A wealthy merchant, or his widow, left money to house elderly women of small means, rent free, in little homes facing a private garden. From the street you see nothing at all. That was the point.

   This one dates from the middle of the seventeenth century and carries the name of its founding family, Raep. It sounds almost exactly like raap, the Dutch word for turnip, and Amsterdammers have never been able to resist that joke. Right beside it hides a second courtyard, the Bossche Hofje, so this short street is really a little nest of secrets.

   Life inside was generous, but it came with rules. Regents, the trustees, chose the residents and could throw them out. In many hofjes the gate was locked at night, men were not welcome after dark, quarrelling could cost you your home, and you were expected in church on Sunday. A rich man's charity was also his monument: his name over the gate, his reputation, perhaps his soul, polished for ever by the gratitude of the women inside.

   People still live in the Jordaan's hofjes today, so if a gate is closed, it stays closed, and if one is open, you go in quietly, as a guest in somebody's garden. That small courtesy is the price of the most peaceful places in Amsterdam. Now walk south through one of the narrow cross streets until you reach the broad Lindengracht, another canal that lost its water.

3. 3. Suyckerhofje and the Eel Riot of the Lindengracht

   Lindengracht 149, 1015 KD Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Find the narrow door at number 149 in the row of houses along the Lindengracht, and if it happens to be open, you will see a long, dim corridor running away from the street. At the end of it, light, green leaves, and a small hidden courtyard. That is the Suyckerhofje, founded in 1667 by a merchant called Pieter Jansz Suyckerhoff.

   It is one of the most charming hofjes in the city, a handful of homes so tucked away that you could live on this street for years without knowing it was there. Respect the residents, peek and move on... because the street outside has a much louder story.

   In 1886 the Lindengracht was still a canal. And on Sundays the Jordaan played a cruel old game called palingtrekken, eel pulling. A live eel was hung from a rope stretched across the water, and young men in a rowing boat tried to grab it as they passed underneath. The slippery eel usually won, and someone usually ended up in the canal. The city had banned the game, and on the twenty-fifth of July a policeman stepped forward and cut the rope.

   The crowd exploded. Stones, roof tiles and flowerpots rained on the police from the windows, and over the next day the fighting spread through the neighbourhood, with barricades in the streets. The army was called in and opened fire. When it was over, twenty-six people were dead and well over a hundred injured. The Palingoproer, the Eel Riot, sounds like a comic story, and it is still told with a grin in the Jordaan... but it was really the anger of a poor, crowded quarter, and it ended in a massacre.

   Within a decade the canal was filled in, and today the Lindengracht hosts one of the best street markets in town on Saturdays, fish, cheese, flowers and fabric where the eel once dangled. Now head east along the Lindengracht and turn right towards the big church square, the Noordermarkt.

4. 4. Noordermarkt: Monday Junk, Saturday Farmers

   Noordermarkt, 1015 MV Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Walk into the square and let the church slide to the edge of your vision for a moment, because today the star is the ground around it. Cobbles, plane trees, café terraces, and, if your timing is lucky, a crush of market stalls. This is the Noordermarkt, the living room of the Jordaan.

   It works in two shifts. On Monday mornings, it becomes a flea market: old records, chipped Delft plates, wool coats, vintage lamps, boxes of mysterious keys. Locals arrive early, before the light is properly up, because the best things go first. On Saturdays the square turns respectable and green, with a farmers' market of organic bread, cheeses, mushrooms and apple juice, a tradition that began in the 1980s and now draws people from all over the city.

   Markets here are much older than that. The Noorderkerk, designed by Hendrick de Keyser in the shape of a Greek cross, was built in the 1620s for the people of this new working-class district, and trade soon gathered at its feet. Buying and selling on this square is a habit that goes back centuries, long before anyone called it vintage.

   And this square has a political memory too. On the twenty-fourth of February 1941, days after the German occupiers had rounded up hundreds of young Jewish men in the Jewish quarter, an open-air meeting was held here on the Noordermarkt. The call went out for a general strike. The next morning trams stopped, shipyards fell silent, and Amsterdam staged the first mass protest against the persecution of the Jews anywhere in occupied Europe.

   So when you buy a cracked teacup here on a Monday, you are standing where ordinary people once decided to risk everything for their neighbours. Now walk west along the wide Westerstraat, the street that runs straight out of the square.

5. 5. Westerstraat: The Cloth Market on a Buried Canal

   Westerstraat 180, 1015 MP Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Notice how wide the Westerstraat is compared with the tight little streets crossing it. Trees down the middle, bicycles in thick hedges, plenty of sky. That width is the shape of a canal. Until the nineteenth century this was the Anjeliersgracht, the Carnation Canal, and then it was filled in and renamed.

   Carnation, rose, lily, laurel, palm, linden, eglantine: the Jordaan's builders named almost every street and canal after a flower or a tree. And the name Jordaan itself? A favourite story says it comes from the French jardin, garden, in the mouths of Huguenot refugees who settled here. It is a lovely idea, but most historians are sceptical, and some prefer the river Jordan of the Bible. Nobody has settled it, which suits the Jordaan perfectly.

   On Monday mornings the Westerstraat turns into the Lapjesmarkt, the rag market: bolts of cloth, buttons, ribbons, zips, curtain fabric by the metre, joining up with the flea market on the Noordermarkt. For generations this was where Jordaan women bought the material to make and mend the family's clothes.

   Because behind the flowery names, this was a hard place. The Jordaan was built in the seventeenth century for workers, craftsmen and immigrants, and by the nineteenth century tens of thousands of people were packed into its narrow houses, often a whole family in one room or a damp cellar. In July 1934, in the depths of the Depression, the government cut unemployment benefits. The Jordaan rose. Barricades went up, the police and the army came in, and several people were killed in what is remembered as the Jordaanoproer, the Jordaan Riot.

   Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, planners drew up schemes to tear down large parts of the old neighbourhood, and residents fought to keep their streets. Much of what charms you here survives because people refused to leave. Now turn left down one of the narrow cross streets to the Egelantiersgracht, and look for number 107, where a passage of blue tiles is waiting.

6. 6. Sint Andrieshofje and the Egelantiersgracht

   Egelantiersgracht 107, 1015 RE Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Walk along the water of the Egelantiersgracht, under the elms, past houseboats and leaning gables, and find number 107. If the door is open, step into the passage and stop. The walls are lined, floor to ceiling, with blue-and-white glazed tiles, cool and shining, like walking into a Delft plate.

   This is the Sint Andrieshofje, founded in the 1610s and completed around 1617, which makes it one of the oldest hofjes in Amsterdam... after the Begijnhof, it is usually called the second oldest. Beyond the tiles waits a small courtyard garden, closed in on all sides by little homes.

   What makes it remarkable is its faith. After 1578 Amsterdam was a Protestant city, and Catholics could not worship in public. Yet this hofje was founded for Catholic residents, right in the middle of the new Calvinist district. The city tolerated a great deal, as long as you were discreet about it, and a closed door on a quiet canal was the most discreet thing in the world.

   Egelantier is the old Dutch word for the eglantine, the sweet briar rose, and this is the canal that ends up on postcards. At the far eastern end of the canal, at number 12, stands a tiny café with a terrace almost on the water, 't Smalle. The story goes that in the late eighteenth century a distiller called Pieter Hoppe made jenever, Dutch gin, in the building and ran a tasting room, where customers would sip the first glass bent over the bar without lifting it, so as not to spill a drop.

   That little bow over a brimming glass is still how many Amsterdammers take their first jenever. Try it some evening... but not before the end of the walk. For now, walk east along the water and turn left into the Eerste Egelantiersdwarsstraat, where another hofje has a story that runs all the way to Norway.

7. 7. Claes Claesz Hofje: A Mennonite Merchant from Oslo

   Eerste Egelantiersdwarsstraat 3, 1015 SC Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Step through the gateway into the first courtyard and listen. With luck you may hear a piano, a violin or a cello practising scales behind one of the small windows. Then look around at the brick walls, the green doors and the tiny gardens, and you are in one of the oldest and loveliest hofjes in Amsterdam, the Claes Claesz Hofje.

   Its founder was Claes Claesz Anslo, a cloth merchant who came from Norway. Anslo is simply the old name of Oslo, the town his family came from, worn like a badge. In 1616 he founded this almshouse for the poor and elderly, and over the centuries it grew into a little labyrinth of courtyards joined by passages, with houses facing several different streets.

   Claes was a Mennonite, a member of a peaceful Protestant movement that rejected weapons, refused to swear oaths and baptised only adults who chose the faith. In much of Europe that got you persecuted. In Amsterdam it got you rich, if you were good at cloth. And here is the surprise: a member of the same family, Cornelis Claesz Anslo, became a famous Mennonite preacher, and in 1641 Rembrandt painted him with his wife, the preacher in mid-sentence, his hand raised over an open Bible. That painting hangs today in Berlin.

   Look out, too, for the stones set into the walls around the complex. Before house numbers, Amsterdam houses were known by their gable stones, little carved and painted pictures that served as an address, a ship, a bird, a trade, a pun on the owner's name. Old Amsterdammers gave directions by them, and the Jordaan is still full of these little signboards in stone.

   In the twentieth century the hofje was rescued by a society that restores historic houses, and today its homes are rented mostly to students, many of them young musicians. Old ladies once prayed here, and now young people practise Bach. Somehow the place is still devout. Now cross the Egelantiersgracht and head south through a cross street to the Bloemgracht, the grandest canal of the Jordaan.

8. 8. Bloemgracht: The Herengracht of the Jordaan

   Bloemgracht 87, 1015 TK Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Stand on the bridge and look down the Bloemgracht in both directions. Taller houses, finer gables, stepped and bell-shaped, steady rows of windows, some with hoisting beams under the roof. Amsterdammers call it the Herengracht of the Jordaan, the gentlemen's canal of a neighbourhood that had very few gentlemen.

   Look for three houses side by side with gable stones showing a townsman, a countryman and a seaman, built in 1642 and known together as the Three Hendricks. They are the street's most famous faces. But the Bloemgracht's real secret is something you can no longer see at all.

   In the seventeenth century, the Bloemgracht was home to the printing works of the Blaeu family, the greatest mapmakers of their age. Willem Jansz Blaeu was official cartographer to the Dutch East India Company, and his son Joan produced the Atlas Maior in the 1660s: hundreds of hand-coloured maps in up to a dozen volumes, the largest and most expensive book of the century. Rulers across the world received copies as diplomatic gifts. Every coastline the Dutch sailors charted ended up on paper somewhere near the canal in front of you.

   And then, in 1672, a fire swept through the Blaeu business and destroyed presses, stock and engraved copper plates. It was the same year France, England and two German prince-bishops attacked the Dutch Republic, the year the Dutch still call the Disaster Year. Joan Blaeu died the following year, and the firm never recovered. The world's finest atlases had been made in a street named after flowers... and then they simply stopped.

   Today the Bloemgracht is one of the calmest canals in the city, and nothing marks the spot where the presses stood. Now walk south across the Rozengracht, where Rembrandt spent his last, poor years until his death in 1669, and continue one canal further to the quiet Lauriergracht.

9. 9. Lauriergracht: The Coffee Broker at Number 37

   Lauriergracht 37, 1016 RG Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Walk slowly along the Lauriergracht and count the house numbers until you reach 37. Whatever you see there, a door, a window box, a bicycle, picture instead a stout, satisfied man in a dark coat, counting his money. He never existed. And yet he is the most famous resident this canal ever had.

   In 1860 a novel appeared called Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company. Its first lines are spoken by a coffee broker called Batavus Droogstoppel, who introduces himself proudly: he is a broker in coffee, and he lives on the Lauriergracht, number 37. Every Dutch schoolchild knows that sentence.

   Droogstoppel is a joke, a pompous, penny-pinching hypocrite. But the book around him was deadly serious. Its author signed himself Multatuli, Latin for I have suffered much, and his real name was Eduard Douwes Dekker, an Amsterdammer who had served as a colonial official in Java. He had seen how the colonial system forced Javanese farmers to grow coffee and sugar for the Dutch market, and how local rulers, with Dutch officials looking away, squeezed the people until they starved.

   Max Havelaar caused a sensation. It did not end colonial rule, not by a long way, but it changed how the Dutch talked about their empire, and some call it the book that killed colonialism. Over a century later, in 1988, the first Fairtrade label for coffee was launched in the Netherlands, and it was named Max Havelaar.

   So the cosiest canal of the Jordaan carries the address of the man who stood for everything Multatuli hated, a sober Dutch house paid for, indirectly, by somebody else's hunger. Multatuli has a statue on the Singel, gazing over the water. Now walk west along the canal and take a cross street south to the Elandsstraat, where another hidden courtyard is waiting.

10. 10. Hofje Venetiae: Venice in a Jordaan Courtyard

    Elandsstraat 106, 1016 SH Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Look for a modest gate in the Elandsstraat with a single word on it that seems to belong somewhere else entirely: Venetiae. Venice, in Latin, on a street in the Jordaan. Behind it lies a small courtyard garden, framed by low almshouse homes.

    The Hofje Venetiae was founded in the middle of the seventeenth century, at the height of Amsterdam's Golden Age. Why Venice? The usual explanation is that the founder had grown rich trading with the Venetian republic, and gave his charity the name of the city that had given him his fortune. It is a good story, and an Amsterdam one: two great merchant cities on the water, one of them on the rise and the other slowly sinking, at least in its power.

    In fact Amsterdam liked to think of itself as the new Venice. Both were republics of merchants, both were built on wooden piles driven into mud, both lived on ships, and visitors compared them constantly. Amsterdam's Golden Age elite read Italian, bought Italian paintings and borrowed Italian architecture for their palaces, including the town hall on the Dam.

    Like every hofje on this walk, Venetiae is still home to residents, so the same rule applies: if the gate is open, enter like a guest, if not, enjoy the name and walk on. Notice, too, how the hofjes have followed us from the north to the south of the Jordaan. There were once dozens of them in this quarter, small islands of order and green in one of the most crowded neighbourhoods in Europe, built by rich men who wanted to be remembered kindly.

    Around here the street names change their theme: Elandsgracht, elk canal, and Looiersgracht, tanners' canal, once the domain of leatherworkers and their smells. And the last stop of the walk belongs not to merchants or regents, but to the people of the Jordaan themselves. Follow the Elandsstraat east towards the Prinsengracht, and at the end of the Elandsgracht you will find a little square full of singers in bronze.

11. 11. Johnny Jordaanplein: The Singers in Bronze

    Johnny Jordaanplein, 1016 LJ Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Here they are, the bronze crowd on the little square at the end of the Elandsgracht: singers and an accordion player, life size, frozen at the best moment of the party. Go ahead and stand among them. Everybody does.

    The singer in the middle of it all is Johnny Jordaan, born Johannes van Musscher in 1924, a boy from this neighbourhood who became the voice of Amsterdam. From the 1950s he sang the sentimental, swaying songs of the Jordaan, about mothers and canals and lost love and the city itself, and his recordings of songs like Geef mij maar Amsterdam, roughly Just give me Amsterdam, made him a national star.

    Around him stand his companions of the Jordaan song: Tante Leen, Aunt Leen, the beloved singer of the neighbourhood cafés, Manke Nelis, and the accordionist Johnny Meijer. This was music made in smoky bars and at street parties, sung by everyone at once, with an accordion and a lot of beer. The Jordaan had its own accent, its own humour, its own street festival, and these were its stars.

    Johnny Jordaan's life was not as simple as his songs. He was gay in a time when that could cost a singer his career, and the neighbourhood that adored his voice did not always want to know about his private life. He died in 1989, and the city gave him this square, and then his friends, in bronze, one by one.

    So the walk ends where it should: not with a monument to a merchant, a regent or a king, but with ordinary people singing. Hidden courtyards, Monday markets, riots over eels and over bread, a broker in coffee and a lost atlas... the Jordaan has always been poor, stubborn, musical and proud. Find a café on the Prinsengracht, order something, and if anyone starts to sing, you know what to do.