Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  But as the city grew, people wantonly ignored the law. Look at any of the many maps and paintings that exist from, say, 1600 to 1610, and you find dozens if not hundreds of buildings of various types beyond the walls, along with neatly laid-out gardens and fences. Despite potentially putting themselves in harm’s way, people were defying the city ordinance, for the oldest of reasons: it was cheaper. Land was cheaper, and, crucially, beyond the city walls you didn’t have to pay city taxes.

  By 1610, the old way of doing things had completely fallen apart. The city needed to expand and to raise the money for its expanded urban infrastructure by selling off parcels. There lurches onto the panel of history at this point the curious figure of Frans Hendricksz Oetgens. He is the man most responsible for the great expansion of the city in its golden age: for the physical manifestation of Amsterdam’s commitment to liberalism. At the same time, he demonstrated a ruthlessness, cunning, and utter lack of civic responsibility that could have served as a model for people like Bernard Madoff, Charles Ponzi, and other individuals synonymous with the scheming and rapacity that would accompany financial liberalism through the centuries.

  As far as we know, Oetgens lived his whole life within the city of Amsterdam. He was born in 1558, near the start of Philip II’s long and bloody reign as Spanish monarch. He had come of age amid the first period of the Dutch war of independence from Spain, when Willem of Orange led Dutch patriots against the Duke of Alba. He started humbly, training as a mason, and in the years after Amsterdam threw off its Catholic overlords he helped to build it anew. The first building project that we know he worked on was the Zuiderkerk, or Southern Church, the third of the city’s three great churches. He also had a role in constructing the exchange building. As he prospered, he bought one of those houses on the right side of the Damrak that today make up a row of urban detritus; there he lived with his wife and their six children. Later he joined Van Os and others in becoming one of the directors of the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC. Oetgens ultimately worked himself into the position of fabrieksmeester: city builder. It was, at this unique moment, perhaps the most important job in the city. It was an ideal place, and the perfect time, for a man of ambition.

  Oetgens can perhaps be said to have had some ambition for the city, but it is beyond doubt that his greatest ambition was reserved for himself and his fortune. He urged the city’s panel of four mayors to give up the long-standing policy of barring building outside the defensive walls. They acquiesced, putting him in charge of the expansion project, an action that could have been the inspiration for the fox-guarding-the-henhouse saying. Oetgens worked with the city carpenter, Hendrick Jacobszoon Staets, to map out precisely where the city would expand. Meanwhile, he won an appointment as one of the four mayors and from there got several friends appointed to positions in the city government. Most notable of these was his brother-in-law, Barthold Cromhout. Together, Oetgens and Cromhout oversaw the expansion of Amsterdam. One of their first achievements was to have committee meetings held in secret. Next, they proceeded to buy much of the land that they had targeted for inclusion in the city. This was mostly swamp, which Oetgens and Cromhout got for next to nothing since of course the owners of the land were ignorant of the secret expansion agreement. Their plan, then, was to wait for the value to rise. One example, cited by Clé Lesger: a stretch of land just beyond the western walls of the city that Oetgens, Cromhout, and two of their cohorts purchased for 16,179 guilders in 1611 was valued in 1615 at 122,247 guilders.

  Oetgens and other speculators orchestrated dozens of such deals. Eventually the land was divided into lots and sold to individuals in a curious process that became known as an Amsterdam auction. I attended an Amsterdam auction conducted by the city’s association of realtors—for repossessed real estate in the city continues to be sold by the same process. An Amsterdam auction consists of two parts. The first is like an ordinary auction: bidding starts low and rises. But the highest bidder does not necessarily get the property. In one case I observed, bidding on a house and garage began at €200,000. With the usual waves and gestures, people in the crowded, boisterous rotunda of a room pushed the price up, until the gavel came down at €430,000. A man rushed to the table set up in front of the room, where a panel of two realtors and the auctioneer held court, signed a paper, and shook hands. Then the auctioneer started round two by naming another figure: €300,000. Silence in the room. Rapidly, then, he descended: “€250,000 … 200 … 150 …” When he reached €60,000, someone in the room burst out with a single sharp syllable: “Mijn!” Saying “mine” in the second round is the unequivocal signal that you will take the property at that price. That is to say, the small bald man in the gray suit who now darted to the front table had agreed to buy the property for €60,000 more than the round one price of €430,000—or for a total of €490,000. If the round two figure had dropped to zero, the highest bidder of round one would have gotten the property.

  The Amsterdam auction seems to have developed in the era of the city’s expansion as a way to spice up the bidding process, for it adds some extra layers of complexity. For one, the top bidder in round one received (and still does receive) a cash prize for nudging up the value, whether or not he was topped in round two. This practice led to its own form of speculation. Some people took to bidding on properties even when they had no money to pay for them, in hopes that they would win the reward money and then get beaten out in the second round. Someone who was caught—stuck with buying a property he didn’t have the money for—was called a sheep. A sheep spent two months in prison as punishment. But the air was so thick with the scent of money to be made that many people risked it.

  Meanwhile, the larger illegality in the expansion that made Amsterdam the jewel of the golden age, the flagrantly corrupt speculation of Oetgens, Cromhout, and others, which was an appropriate coda to what might be Europe’s first great expression of economic liberalism in the arena of real estate, was met by one of the first systematic attempts at regulation. In this case, Oetgens, the villain, had a counterpart. Also on the city government was a man named Cornelis Hooft. In Dutch history he is best known as the father of one of the great poets in the language, Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (who isn’t read much these days and is probably familiar to most Amsterdammers only by virtue of the fact that the city’s toniest shopping street is named for him). But more importantly he acted as whistle-blower as well as moral, legal, and political block against the unscrupulosity of Oetgens and Cromhout. Hooft was a stern-looking, deeply religious man who became so famous for his sense of fairness that the greatest of Dutch dramatists, Joost van den Vondel (also little read today but namesake of a large park in Amsterdam), characterized his role in the city’s history in verse:

  Hoe heeft hem Amsteldam ervaeren wiis en simpel:

  Een hoofd vol kreucken, een geweten sonder rimpel.

  Or: “How did Amsterdam know him but wise and simple: / A brow of folds, [but] a conscience without a wrinkle.”

  Once Hooft saw what was going on, he launched a sustained attack on Oetgens—or rather, two attacks. One was based on the liberal concept of free trade: Oetgens and his cronies were using their inside knowledge to confound the free market. The other was moral. Quoting from the Bible and classical authorities, Hooft played the part of prosecuting attorney, telling his fellow municipal leaders that each of them had a duty toward the city that he likened to the role of a foster parent toward an orphan. Amsterdam, he said, was a child, a perennial child, who had to be protected and nourished and helped to grow. For base personal gain, the speculators were violating their sacred moral responsibility.

  Hooft won his case. Oetgens and Cromhout fell from power. They soon got themselves reinstated, though, and restacked the council with men sympathetic to their views (that is, other speculators). The fight went on for years, with twists and turns, but in the end it can be said that the speculators won. They enriched themselves fantastically, at the city’s expense, and were allowed to get away with it becau
se so many of the city’s other supposed foster parents decided to join them at their game. On one of the lots of land that Cromhout had schemed to buy he built a home, and later his son rebuilt it. Today, you can see a ghost of the family association on its facade in the form of a bas-relief image of a twisted log: the name Cromhout means (appropriately) bent wood. Ironically enough for a structure that might be said to stand as a testament to immorality, the building has served, since the 1970s, as the home of the Bible Museum. Recently the street-level rooms were configured into a museum showcasing the Cromhout family’s wealthy lifestyle in the eighteenth century.

  While the speculation battle raged, work was going on to develop the new districts. And for all the corruption on one side, the care and foresight that went into the overall development was probably unprecedented in human history. In one swoop, the surface size of the city was increased fivefold. The development took the form of three new canals that would wrap in a semicircle around the medieval center. The sensibility behind it all was strikingly modern. Each of the new canals was given a fancy name to attract the nouveau riche merchant class to build gracious homes: Prinsengracht (Prince’s Canal), Keizersgracht (Emperor’s Canal), Herengracht (Gentlemen’s Canal).

  Before building could happen, the swampy terrain needed to be pumped. First, the perimeter fortifications had to be built. Then mills had to be erected. Then the new canals had to be dug and a system of locks constructed so that the canals would be flushed daily. Try as one might, it is impossible to imagine the effort all of this took. For of course it was done without machinery. You get the gist from the occasional print or painting that shows wheelbarrows and shovels, men’s legs planted in thick mud, boards laid down for the barrows to traverse the glop. But still, in the span of a single lifetime:

  Six miles of canal were dredged by hand and foot (using water wheels powered like stationary bicycles).

  Twelve miles of canal-side land were built up, with mud from where the canals were dug out and with sand hauled in via barges, to raise the ground level enough above water to build on.

  Somewhere around one hundred bridges were constructed.

  A dozen miles of canal-side road were laid brick by brick.

  And then came the houses: upwards of three thousand of them, every single one built, with outrageous improbability, on shifting marshland, requiring the backbreaking work of pile driving by manual labor. This in itself was such a supreme effort that the Dutch word for pile driving—heien—is the root of a number of sayings, songs, and folktales. A single house required maybe forty pairs of piles, each a stout, straight log of Scandinavian pine, to be jammed forty or sixty feet into the peat, sand, and clay. The grandiose City Hall, built on Dam Square in 1653 (today known as the Royal Palace), required 13,659 piles. Were you to travel to Amsterdam in its glory days, probably the sight you would have been most struck by would have been that of the triangular “trees” of support posts dotting the landscape, each with a block of iron weighing maybe half a ton poised above the pile. Teams of thirty or forty men, keeping time by chanting songs and fueled by ready barrels of beer, simultaneously pulled ropes to heave the heiblok into the air; then, on the call from the heibaas, they would let loose and the weight would slam down, hammering the log a little deeper into the ground. The Scandinavian logs are still there: the canal houses you see in Amsterdam’s central ring today (except for those that have had their foundations replaced) rest on piles that were rammed into the earth in the 1600s. That they are still holding up so much of the city is the result of a bit of seventeenth-century genius. The engineers knew that the logs would not rot once they were below the waterline. The problem was the tops had to rest in the air, where masonry fixed them to the bricks, in order for the mortar to harden. The solution was to dig ditches where the piles would be driven to a point below the waterline and then temporarily pump water out of them. Once the mortar had dried, the water could be let back in the ditch, and the pile, safely under water, remained preserved from the ravaging effects of oxygen.

  This went on throughout much of the century. As you read the next two chapters, keep it in the back of your mind: while Rembrandt painted and directed his business empire, while Spinoza stood before a synagogue tribunal on the charge of heresy, while the merry companies patrolled and caroused and scientists tinkered with lenses and sliced into corpses, the entire city, throughout its golden age, was a construction site, a work in progress.

  Amsterdam’s canal ring, when completed, was the greatest urban feat of the age, a model for cities from England to Sweden. Peter the Great set himself up in the city for a time, studying its engineering and urban planning techniques, and then put them to practice in constructing St. Petersburg, which was likewise built on marshland. For four centuries Amsterdam’s canal ring has been a wonder, worthy of tourism and imitation, for reasons that UNESCO identified when in 2010 it named the district a World Heritage site: “It is a masterpiece of hydraulic engineering, town planning, and a rational programme of construction and bourgeois architecture.” In other words, the reason early modern Europeans marveled at Amsterdam’s golden age urban core was that it served people, extraordinarily well. And the people it served were not princes or popes but merchants and tradesmen. As Europe lurched toward secularism, democracy, modernity, a society based on the individual, it became intrigued by this city that had remade itself to serve the ordinary individual and his or her upwardly mobile aspirations. The new city Amsterdam became brought the world to one’s doorstep. Ships anchored in the harbor, where goods were then transferred to small vessels and ferried right into the canal zone, to be unloaded directly into homes that were also warehouses. A man could sail from China or Japan to Amsterdam and enter his front parlor and the bosom of his family almost without touching solid ground. The canals were like arms that the city sent out to reach around the globe and gather its plenty back to it.

  The rings of concentric canals, with radial canals and streets serving as spokes, was likewise set up for bourgeois living. Everything was within reach of the ordinary man or woman. And while there was of course a division of rich and poor, the classes were not divided by neighborhood. Rather, the rich lived on the canals and the poor lived on the streets interspersed behind each canal. This division had long been obvious to me, but I had never stopped to consider the cultural meaning behind the fact that the poor were not ghettoized. It was brought home to me by Paul Spies, the director of the Amsterdam Museum and custodian of the city’s historical artifacts, one day as we sat in his office in central Amsterdam, in what was built (in 1580) as one of the world’s first orphanages, looking down onto the museum’s collection of “merry company” portraits of the men who had conceived and built all of this. “When they constructed their ideal city in the seventeenth century, Amsterdammers kept rich and poor together,” he said. “They all lived in the same neighborhoods—everyone met at church. This came out of the Dutch mentality of modesty. In other countries in Europe, where the rich had their own neighborhoods, the separation said, ‘I’m the master, and you are totally dependent on me.’ But we had the Calvinist mindset, which said, ‘We are all small people. None of us are gods.’ ”

  This mentality of modesty also had its origins in the communal sensibility that is so elemental to the country’s water-bound culture, and Spies pushed me to see it as part of the explanation for why the world’s first stock exchange was founded in Amsterdam. Here, once again, we find the irony that a collective sensibility is somehow tied to what we think of as extreme individualism. For if on the one hand the stock market can be seen as an instrument of individual empowerment, you can also look at it as a collectivist enterprise. As Spies said, “With stocks the impulse was, ‘Let’s share the risk and maybe we’ll all get ahead.’ ”

  One of the defining features of our time is the push in the political arena for greater individual freedom of movement, especially economically. In the United States, this is typically a conservative position, associated with th
e Republican Party. In Europe, it is a Liberal position (with “Liberal” here relating to individual economic freedom). In both places, the position defends the rights of individuals to make money and sees the threat as coming from either the government or society—from “socialism” of one kind or another. The left-wing position, meanwhile, tends to put society ahead of the individual. But the example of Amsterdam as it took a lead role in developing liberalism—the broad principle of individual freedom, which underlies both sides of this argument—shows that there was a constant dance between society and the individual. The communal desire to share risk brought about the first multinational corporation and the first stock exchange. For the residents of Amsterdam, a communal urge to work together led to scintillating and unprecedented individual success and advancement. And as that individual success fueled their society, the society crafted a new kind of urban space, one that further promoted cooperation as a strategy for advancing individual power.

  CHAPTER

  5

  THE LIBERAL CITY

  Opinions differ on the question of whether a golden age is something you can experience while it’s happening or whether it only comes into focus on reflection. When the poet Randall Jarrell half joked that “the people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks,” he was voicing a suspicion that no matter how grand and prosperous and momentous the time in which you are living may be, its grandeur is inevitably stained by the incessant drabness of the present.