This year we decided to take our summer vacation in Amsterdam. For my family, Amsterdam is not just any destination. I lived in the city for seven years and wrote a book about it. My partner, Pamela, lived there for 23 years. We met in Amsterdam. Our son was born in the city. We have friends, family, colleagues, memories and roots there. It is, logically and in our hearts, our second home. And yet, three years after returning to the United States, we realized that it had become shockingly remote in our lives. So while the trip would be a vacation, the real motive was to spend a couple of weeks reclaiming Amsterdam.
We had been hearing and reading that the city had changed dramatically in the short time since we had moved, thanks to a number of forces. The population is growing, the city has plans to build 50,000 homes over the next 10 years, and the largest group of newcomers (both Dutch and immigrants from places like Turkey and Morocco) are those between the ages of 20 and 34, who are putting down roots and reshaping the urban landscape.
At the same time, real estate prices are spiking. That’s partly because housing costs in top-tier European cities like London and Paris have moved into the stratosphere, while the Netherlands is one of the few places where it is possible to obtain a mortgage with no money down.
Meanwhile, a few years ago Amsterdam ramped up permits for new hotels, which began coming online at the same time the Airbnb phenomenon hit. To all of that you have to factor in the ineffable: that global hipsterism came to the conclusion that Amsterdam — with its orderly northern languor, its human scale, its society built around coffee and beer — was a place of relevance.
On our arrival, however, it seemed that nothing had changed. Taking the train from the airport and stepping out of Central Station, you encounter the familiar detritus, the same ragged rumble of buses and traffic and ugly shops and wayward tourists heading up the streets called Damrak and Rokin toward the city center. Also unchanged, thankfully, is the canal zone, the heart and soul of Amsterdam. Here, where gabled brick houses line the central canals, it is always the Dutch Golden Age.
When we got to our lodgings — a canal house in the medieval city center — we found that the past still seemed tangibly and reassuringly present. Friends of ours, Kiki Amsberg and Joost Smiers, she a journalist, he a political scientist, are a couple who for more than 30 years lived in back-to-back, his-and-hers houses that share a courtyard and look out on different canals. After all that time, they had decided to move in together, so they offered us the smaller of their homes. Thus we had a classic canal house, built circa 1600, to ourselves. Each room looked out onto the medieval and ruminative Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal. Walk a few blocks and you’d be smack in the Red Light District, but at this end of the canal all was tranquil.
Each day we ate breakfast — croissants and coffee from the bakery around the corner — in our kitchen. With low ceilings, enormous beams and Delft tiles lining the hearth, it seemed almost unchanged from the period when the house was built. Rembrandt lived in this part of the city, and it occurred to me one morning, mid-croissant, that the artist could conceivably have known the occupant and sat in this very kitchen.
As it turned out, the antique facade of the neighborhood — the Binnenstad, or Inner City — belied vigorous change. Kiki told me that wealthy foreigners, especially Russians and Chinese, were buying up many of these tilting, toylike houses, driving up the prices. The sense of community was eroding, she lamented, as neighbors left, and many buildings now stood mostly empty, no longer homes but pied-à-terres awaiting the occasional appearances of their new globalized owners.
Once we had rented bicycles (the only proper way to get around the city), other changes became apparent. Amsterdam’s popularity as a travel destination has applied mostly to its center, and to some extent its long-gentrified southern districts. Venture even a short way to the eastern or western parts of the city, or across the waterfront called the IJ, into Amsterdam North, and you were likely to find yourself in humdrum working-class districts or areas colonized by recent immigrants: neighborhoods of women wearing headscarves, of drab social housing units clustered around proletariat playgrounds.
We now discovered that gentrification and tourism have reached into these districts. Over coffee at De Jaren, the big, modern, centrally located cafe that serves as my unofficial headquarters when I’m in Amsterdam, my friend Ruth Oldenziel, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, told me, “I now see tourists in my neighborhood taking photos as if it were the city center.”
This wasn’t entirely surprising. The houses along the main street in her neighborhood, Weesperzijde, were built in the 19th and early 20th centuries rather than the more evocative 17th, but since the street runs alongside the scenic Amstel River, it’s a natural draw.
But I refused to believe it when Pamela’s 25-year-old son, Reinier Koch, who lives in Amsterdam, insisted that the Indische Buurt, or Indies Neighborhood, had likewise been transformed. It had long been the home of Turkish and Morroccan immigrants, of halal butchers and poky corner groceries smelling of cumin.
Yet he was right. Here, though, it wasn’t tourists but locals driving the change. Rising prices elsewhere in the city have led young families, artists and others to become pioneers. Cruising down the Javastraat, the main thoroughfare, we passed several indicators of gentrification: an olive oil boutique, a frozen yogurt shop, a women’s boutique with purses arranged atop distressed wood tables and, as if to underscore the transformation, a coffee bar called Bedford-Stuyvesant.
We sat at the outdoor cafe of the way-too-cutely named Bar Basquiat and ate pork belly buns and pizza with Turkish sausage while androgynous couples and archly dressed Asian youths prowled the sidewalks. Occasionally an elderly woman in headscarf marched by, seemingly inured to the changes. Someone clapped me on the shoulder. I looked up to find an old acquaintance who works for the city government. “Welcome to my neighborhood!” he cried. He confirmed the rapid change we had been observing, saying that in his opinion the community now had just the right mix of new and traditional elements. But like many other Amsterdammers I talked to, he hoped the influx of tourists and new residents would slow down.
We saw similar changes in the western reaches of the city. The Spaarndammerbuurt is one of the neighborhoods where the Amsterdam School architects of the early 20th century developed their style, turning simple brick dwellings into artful and sometimes whimsical statements. It was always a workers’ quarter. It’s now alive with wine purveyors and vegetarian takeouts. We had a great dinner at Pikoteo, a relaxed and inventive tapas restaurant recently opened by two partners, one from Madrid and the other from Amsterdam.
Amsterdam has long had a bit of a split personality issue because the section called Amsterdam North sits across the harbor from the rest of the city. Municipal planners have worked for years to bring “Noord” into the fold, and that seems to be bearing results. The main barrier, besides the water, has always been Central Station. Planners have now reworked the traffic on the northern side of the train station and installed an airport-like plaza of shops. But the most significant change is a tunnel paneled with blue-and-white Dutch tiles depicting old nautical scenes. It ushers pedestrians and cyclists past the mess of the train station and delivers them right to the waterfront and the free ferries.
Not many tourists visited Noord until 2012, when the EYE Film Institute opened on the waterfront just opposite Central Station, looking like an intergalactic cruiser out of “Star Trek.” It has since become a cultural anchor in the area. In June, the 22-story building beside it, once the headquarters of Royal Dutch Shell, opened to the public. Inside are a hotel, performance studios and artist lofts, but we skipped all that, forking out 12.50 euros (about $14) a person to be rocketed 300 feet up to an observation platform called the A’Dam Lookout. It was the most expensive elevator ride of my life, but the sweeping, cleansing views, miles in every direction, were worth it.
There are many new restaurants dotting the waterfront, further cementing the connection between the two parts of the city. MOS, in a starkly modern building jutting out on the IJdok peninsula, is new but offers somewhat old-school “French-international” nouvelle cuisine, along with gorgeous water views. I had a fine meal there, but, together with several other new places where I ate, it stirred a feeling that as the city grows and changes so rapidly, it is also in danger of homogenizing. I don’t doubt that the culinary landscape has improved (traditional Dutch fare being, well, you know), but several times it occurred to me that I could have been having the same dinner in Chicago.
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