Amsterdam is iconic. It is one of those places that is best experienced in your 20’s, but can be appreciated for its diversity and vivacity at any age (yes, I’m talking about you, cannabis). In just three days, the beautiful city of Amsterdam became one of my favorite places in the world. The city is shaped like a half moon or the smile of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. Canals run through the entirety of the city, and beautiful old Dutch houses line these canals side by side in seamless rows. The houses were what made me fall for the city, not just for their beautiful architecture, but also the story behind them.
Take advantage of the FREE morning walking tours through the city. If you’re staying at a hostel, ask the front desk if the tour guide picks you up, because 90% of the time they do! Our guide picked us up right from our hostel, the famous Flying Pig where many travelers stay, and we all walked to Dam Square where the free tour leaves from every day. My guide, Hans was such an intriguing person; he was from Germany, moved to Amsterdam for college four years earlier, and spoke five languages! Apparently, that’s the norm in that part of Europe where languages cross borders because of the multitude of different tongues, and I felt ignorant that my American ears only heard gibberish when anyone spoke anything other than English (despite six years of Spanish classes). We began walking past the beautiful houses that lined the canals of the quaint city, I noticed that some of the houses were crooked, others leaned into the streets, and every single one of them was as narrow as could be. Why was this? Hans answered all three of my questions first with the simple answer: The Dutch do anything they can to save money.
A long time ago, Amsterdam was a marshland with the Amstel river running through it. In order to build a city on top of these wetlands, the Dutch had to dam the Amstel (hence Amsterdam). To build houses on the soft soil, they took logs and thrust them deep into the ground to create stilts for the houses to be built on top of. Through the years, of course, some of these logs have rotted through, making sides of some of the houses sink into the soil slightly. This is what causes them to be crooked. But why don’t the Dutch fix this? Well, the houses are all so close that when one is crooked, it leans up against the house beside it. The way the Dutch see it, if the house isn’t going to fall, then why spend the money to fix it? Instead, they even out the floors and the windows on the inside to make the house appear to be straight. But if you’re on the street, you will notice their crookedness.
As for the narrowness and forward lean of some of the houses, those go hand in hand. In the old days, property taxes on houses in Amsterdam were determined by the width of the house. Therefore, because the Dutch like to save every penny possible, narrow houses 5 stories high were the result. Now, how does one fit furniture and storage into these narrow houses and then proceed to carry them up those 5 steep flights of stairs? Why, you make a pulley on the outside of the house, of course, and hoist everything up through the window. But, how do you make it so that the items being pulled up don’t break the windows when they sway? The Dutch thought the best solution to this was to build houses that tilted forward slightly so that the objects wouldn’t hit the glass. It was too late before they realized that they could just make the pulley longer. And there you have it, the story of the crooked canal houses of Amsterdam!
