First the wealthy lived there, then the poorest, and then the neighborhood was once again for the wealthy. As if it was destined for the process of gentrification, with the temporary interruption of the social decline of more than a century. History scatters patterns and sometimes starts early. In any case, that happened in Maastricht’s Stokstraatkwartier, the nowadays touristy yuppy and shopping district around the Lieve Vrouwenplein, which was famous in the city for a long time for its brash poverty.
Former resident Jo Furthermore, as a six-year-old, he learned his first words while trying to read the text on the sign ‘declared uninhabitable house’, and journalist Frank Bokern who wrote the book there. crap, or scum, overwritten heard from his mother that he was not allowed to come. He has now, as a writer, gone there after all, by touring the archives and touring the last ex-residents. And has uncovered what the urban sedentary elite have always hated. Because, it must be said right away, this book is just as much about administrative unwillingness and inability as it is about the human drama per square meter facilitated by that elite. It gives involved historiography of the better kind, it lets the facts speak.
And they cannot be misunderstood. The dilapidation started after the well-to-do estate withdrew after the Belgian revolt (1830) and the patrician houses fell prey to slum landlords. The proletariat that grew rapidly and was in need of shelter due to the early industrialization of the city (with the hard-hearted entrepreneur Regout, of the pottery) became their prey. On all the fringes of the city and also in the ten narrow streets of the Stokstraatkwartier. People lived on top of each other in draughty and damp roomed houses (167 buildings housed about 1600 residents around 1900). They lived on the streets, washed away their sorrows in the neighborhood bars, one minute they were making noise and arguing and the next they fell into each other’s arms to accordion music – giving the neighborhood its uncivilized reputation.
But the misery must have been many times greater than the by-product of poverty, the sociability of people who simply have to make do with each other. The infant mortality rate was high, the cholera epidemics wreaked havoc even more than in the rest of the city, and people had to live by the day, because no one had steady work.
Incidentally, an alarm was sounded. A report from 1853 speaks of ‘dens of men’ of ‘the less well-off’. A number of priests beat the drums, such as the social priest Henri Poels, who talks about ‘the corpses of children who died in the slums of Maastricht’ and the socialist Willem Vliegen has criticized the misery before.
But it all doesn’t work, until in the 1970s the residents have to make way for trendy shopping opportunities and are sent to so-called residential schools that have been closed elsewhere, but are still being revived in the patronizing Maastricht. Shortly after the war, the city council had decided that demolition was the best social solution for the decomposing neighborhood – a solution that still exists 75 years later and is now called ‘Social Renewal’.
In a book that is much more than the history of a casual neighborhood, but that also tells the story of a city taken hostage by a church, capital and political elite, the reader encounters a disturbing amount of familiarity. Residents are described in reports as incapacitated – and even as ‘moron’ or ‘imbecile’; they are officially defined as unreliable because of their descent, and there is an almost institutional deafness to grievances with those responsible.
Sometimes it seems as if history is actually repeating itself.
Also read: How the ordinary Maastricht residents were expelled from the Stokstraat
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of June 3, 2022