Amsterdam: A 21st-Century transformation

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 Moroccan 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 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.

Oldenziel made the same point in a different way, telling me that the city government had taken steps recently toward restricting houseboats on the canals, where the often quirky and makeshift residences have been a feature since just after World War II. “What I worry about,” she said, “is the impulse to take out all irregularities.”

How far have the changes gone? One of the pleasures of Noord I remembered was the pastoral quiet once you leave the waterfront. During our visit, a local newspaper ran an article decrying the gentrification of Noord, saying in effect that you can’t see the cows anymore for all the BMWs.

One afternoon, my daughter Eva, my son, Anthony, and I cycled out to see if that was true. But 10 minutes after getting off the ferry, we were riding through polders (land reclaimed from the sea). We saw no BMWs, only lots of farmland. We took a detour on a polder path, then stopped. The wind was the only thing we heard. On the waterways cutting between the fields were herons and geese. It was a landscape that could have been painted by Jacob van Ruisdael.

If Amsterdam’s outer reaches have changed in recent years, so has the city center. The complaint we heard from friends who live in the center was about the increase in tourists. Statistics bear this out. There were 4.3 million hotel stays in the city in the first four months of 2016, an 11 percent jump over the same period in 2015, which, itself, was a record high. From the canalsides to central plazas like Leidseplein and Rembrandtplein, the place is packed.

But there are positive changes, too. A few years ago many of the major museums were undergoing renovation at the same time and were either closed or only partly open. All the work has been completed, and these great cultural institutions are now glistening like jewels.

The grandest, the Rijksmuseum, the national repository of Dutch art and history, reopened in 2013, to effusive press. It is staggeringly lovely. The redesign accomplished the tricky task of keeping the integrity of its original, 19th-century structure while at the same time opening it up. What might have come across, to today’s tastes, as a clunky knight’s castle instead feels stately and inviting. Like the city, the museum is more popular than ever. The year before it partly closed for renovation in 2003, it had 800,000 visitors; this year it is on track for two million.

Taco Dibbits, the Rijksmuseum’s new director (previously the head of collections), sat down with me to discuss the museum and the city. When I asked why both were now so popular, he referred me to the time, circa 2000, when Bill Gates caused a stir by saying he didn’t need to collect art because in a digital age you could have any painting appear on your screen. “Instead,” Dibbits said, “what we’re seeing is that in a virtual world, people want to experience real things.”

Dibbits’ assumption of the directorship in July coincided with the return to Amsterdam of a pair of noteworthy former residents. Early this year, the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre jointly purchased Rembrandt’s wedding portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, wealthy 17th-century Amsterdammers, for 160 million euros (more than $178.25 million). The museums will take turns displaying the portraits. (The portraits are on view at the Rijksmuseum through Oct. 2.)

The paintings, which have been given pride of place, next to Rembrandt’s masterpiece “The Night Watch,” have been in private hands since they were painted, and, thus, few people have had a chance to see them until now. They are the first life-size portraits Rembrandt completed.

At the time, only royalty was deemed worthy of such treatment. Rembrandt was just 28, newly arrived in Amsterdam and eager to make his mark. By giving this wealthy but untitled couple the royal treatment, the artist was making a statement about them, about himself and the city. Amsterdam was in the midst of its rise to the status of most powerful city in the world. Its economic engine was powered by people such as the Soolmans and Coppit families: ordinary citizens who had worked their way up to the top, forging great companies whose commerce spanned the globe. The pair of paintings, so alien but so evocative, embody what Amsterdam is all about.

Whenever I return to Amsterdam, I make a point of visiting Frieda Menco, who, at age 91, is literally my oldest friend. As a child she lived around the corner from Anne Frank and became friends with Anne and her sister, Margot. Like the Franks, Menco’s family was rounded up during World War II and sent to a concentration camp. Menco and her mother met up with Anne and her mother in Auschwitz. The Franks were killed; Menco and her mother survived. I became friends with Menco in the process of interviewing her for my book about Amsterdam’s history.

Pamela, Eva, Anthony and I went to her apartment for lunch. Menco had last seen Anthony when he was a toddler. Now he was 6, and she and I told him some of her story. His reaction unfolded across his face: He was simultaneously fascinated and alarmed at the idea that war was not something that only happened in games or on TV. He asked questions; Menco answered. He was interested in everything, right down to the concentration camp number tattooed on her arm.

Only after our lunch with Frieda did it occur to me that Anthony was old enough to appreciate the Anne Frank House. Unfortunately, we hadn’t purchased tickets in advance, and I refused to spend half a day waiting in line. So I took him to one of my favorite smaller attractions, the Dutch Resistance Museum. It has undergone a renovation, and the children’s section was so rich — putting you in the shoes of different children when the city was under Nazi occupation, leading you through a succession of cramped, 1940s parlors and bedrooms, a German soldier at the door, a defiant voice over the radio — that, after we finished, Anthony wanted to do it all over again.

By now our trip had taken on a theme: my son’s absorption with war, the Nazis and the fate of the Jews. A friend told me that a National Holocaust Museum had recently opened. So Anthony and I went. It is a small place, in a former school where Jewish children were shielded from the Nazis. The museum is still being developed, but the opening exhibition — paintings by Dutch actor and artist Jeroen Krabbé — affected both of us. In a series of large canvasses, Krabbé tells the story of his grandfather’s journey from Amsterdam to his death at the Sobibor concentration camp.

We studied the paintings then watched the documentary in which the artist explains them, then returned to the paintings. In the center of the exhibition is a scale model of the Sobibor camp. Anthony wanted to understand how it worked, what precisely was the mechanism for a factory of death. And he asked the questions of a 6-year-old. “When they took all their clothes off, weren’t they cold?” “Why did they shave their heads?”

The effects of Britain’s vote in June to leave the European Union have not shown up yet in Amsterdam. But the topic came up in conversations I had with friends. While people had a range of opinions, nearly everyone thought it would rattle the city. There has been talk of Amsterdam, with its long history as a financial center, eventually replacing London as the unofficial economic capital of the European Union. No one I met with looked forward to such a thing. The city has always been modest in size: With 830,000 residents, its population is one-tenth that of London. “Balance” is what everyone frets over these days, as in how to balance growth and change against tradition and quality of life.

This gets at the core of Amsterdam’s identity. It’s not an accident that the city has no central, representative monument: no Big Ben or Notre Dame or Colosseum.

The closest Amsterdam has to a defining monument was the one we were staying in, thanks to our friends Kiki and Joost: the canal house. An individual family dwelling is an apt symbol for the city because Amsterdam shaped itself around the power and needs of individuals. Where other European capitals were built around the might of the church or a monarch or both, here the central forces were commerce, art and science. All are pursuits spearheaded by individuals.

In Amsterdam’s Golden Age, the city’s traders gathered the exotic goods of the wide world and brought them here, their ships sailing right up the canals to their front doors. They stored those goods — cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper — in their attics. The canals were, in effect, arms extending around the globe, gathering bounty and bringing it not just into the city center but into the very homes of its residents. Dutch interior paintings of the 17th century celebrated the particular brand of domesticity that the Dutch traders fostered. “Gezelligheid” — an untranslatable word that means something like “the warm feeling that comes from being secure and in the embrace of friends and family” — is what animates those paintings.

Indeed, it still animates Amsterdam. We felt it, on our return to the city that has meant so much to us. And we wondered how long it would endure.