Almost Anything Goes In Amsterdam Art And History, Canals And Tulips: There Are Plenty Of Reasons To Visit The Home Of Dutch Tolerance
There’s not much of anything that doesn’t go on in Amsterdam.
There is the squeak of new seats on old bicycles, the snap and crackle of tram wires slapping together in the wind, the chink of coins dropping in a saucer at the pay toilets, the live music thrusting from the doorways of small bars, the chime of bells from towers and the spires of what used to be churches, the drone of tour guides in all the scripted phrases of Babel. Only the canal boats are silent as they glide through the waters of this Dutch city.
People shouldn’t expect Amsterdam to be all tulips and canals, though. There are open-air urinals, sex-related businesses and legal drugs here, as well. People have to watch their step on the cobblestone sidewalks because of all the dog droppings. Graffiti cover many surfaces throughout the central city.
But Amsterdam’s most enduring images are its canal houses. They stand three or four brown-bricked stories tall and hardly a hand’s breadth apart; some lean into the breach on either side. Most are no more than three white-framed windows wide, and their tops, each one different, often sport baroque lions and dolphins or the French-curved curlicues of a dozen Spanish-mission facades.
Their interiors - all high ceilings and steep stairways - are as varied as their occupants:
Anne Frank hid in one for two years until the Nazis found her in 1944. She and seven other Jewish refugees lived in rooms behind a revolving bookcase in what was then a warehouse. To brighten her surroundings, she clipped pictures from magazines and pasted them on the walls. Photographs of Ray Milland and Ginger Rogers are among those still there. So are Anne’s original diaries. The smaller one lies closed, revealing its cloth cover of red plaid; the other is larger, opened to a page pasted with Christmas stamps.
On a Sunday morning in the off season, there can be a 50-minute line to get in. The wait is marked off in quarter-hours by the bells of West Church a few doors down. Rembrandt van Rijn is buried there.
Rembrandt lived and worked in a canal house for 20 years until he went broke in 1656. Its rooms, now crowded with visitors, are as dark as the paintings he was famous for, and its three stories are hung with more than 250 of his original etchings.
A Catholic church conducted services in the 3-story attic of a 17th-century merchant’s home after Protestantism became the order of the day. The Museum Amstelkring, or Christ in the Attic, features pews and altar, an organ loft, a collection of liturgical silver, even a tiny chaplain’s room with a hole-in-the-wall bed. The lower floors are furnished as they would have been by the family who lived in them nearly 400 years ago. Two other canal houses - Museum van Loon and Museum Willet-Holthuysen - are decorated with antiques and are open for tours.
Christ in the Attic is in Amsterdam’s red-light district. The district is a tourist attraction because the prostitutes, instead of walking the streets, sit behind big picture windows that are fitted, usually at the top, with red neon.
Red incandescent bulbs outline the district’s bridges.
The area fits roughly within a triangle formed by Dam Square, where the National Monument and Royal Palace are located; the central train station, which is right next to the centuries-old port; and the Old Church, so called because construction began in the early 1300s.
It’s a 24-hour-a-day business, but most prostitutes wait until twilight to “open the curtains.” They sit on stools, some wearing fishnet.
The prostitutes are only one aspect of the sex industry in Amsterdam. Escort services, gay and straight, are advertised on lampposts near hotels and in entertainment districts. There are live sex shows. There’s a phone number for sex horoscopes. Some shops stock their front windows with various sexual devices.
Amsterdammers consider the open sex, legal drugs and graffiti of today as evidence of Dutch tolerance. But they’re just as proud of their past.
Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer and possibly Frans Hals would be the most recognizable figures of its golden age of art.
The most significant, and certainly the largest, Rembrandt painting here is known as the “Night Watch,” though its real title is 13 words long. It’s important because Rembrandt deviated from tradition when he painted the subjects, members of a militia company, in animated groupings rather than all in a row. Seeing it includes a visit to an anteroom where each element of the painting is dissected and explained.
“Night Watch” hangs, like Vermeer’s “The Kitchen Maid” and Hals’ “Marriage Portrait of Isaac and Beatrix,” in the castlelike Rijksmuseum, and is flanked by two all-in-a-row paintings by Van der Helst, who was the most popular portraitist at the time.
The Van Gogh Museum, dedicated to Amsterdam’s other famous son, displays more than 200 of van Gogh’s paintings. Three of his self-portraits, which he created between 1887-88, hang side by side. Other works such as “Sunflowers” and “Still Life With Irises” are displayed according to where Van Gogh was living at the time he painted them.
Paul Gauguin’s “Paris in Winter” and “Under the Mango Trees” are here, as are lesser-known impressionist canvases by Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso.
Amsterdam’s 17th century is recreated in Madame Tussaud Scenerama, a “branch office” of the London wax museum. Here, Rembrandt is hard at work behind his easel, a rat-catcher plies his trade, children go sledding. A mariner steers his boat along a canal. A Vermeer painting comes to life.
It’s a way for visitors to take a walk though the city - without having to watch their step.
MEMO: For more information: Netherlands Board of Tourism, (800) 953-8824.