In the program The Lost City we go to a different place in Haarlem every time to see how it has changed over time. This time we go back to the Haarlem of the eighteenth century. The time of businessman Pieter Teyler, who we still know from the museum that bears his name.
The former residence of Pieter Teyler can be found in the Haarlem Damstraat, which connects the Grote Markt with the Spaarne. After a major refurbishment of years, the house has been moved to the museum and is open to the public.
A great mystery
The person Pieter Teyler is actually a great mystery, because we don’t know much about him. What we do know about him can be read in the will he left behind. “In that will”, says Linda Mol of the museum, “he instructed five of his friends to make a better world with his legacy. They set up a kind of foundation and fought poverty, for example they founded Teylers Hofje, here in Harlem.”
They also started working with art and science. That was actually the beginning of the Teylers Museum. “After his death, they built the Oval Hall behind his house,” says Linda Mol. “That’s that famous room with the instruments and those beautiful stones and those books. That was at that time, it opened in 1784, a big laboratory.”
Tests were carried out in that laboratory in which the public could be present. You had to buy a ticket. It was not freely accessible.
“There had to be five locks on the door”
Five locks
Before we go outside to see what Haarlem looked like at the time of his life, Linda Mol takes us to the first floor of the house to show a special room. “It is a kind of wooden room, with cupboards containing his securities. That was also stated in his will: at the time of his death, everything of value had to go to that wooden cabinet. And five locks had to be made on that door. Every director was given a key. The space with the securities could only be opened if all five were there.”
Outside the house we meet city guide Mitchell Landsberg. Practically on the doorstep, we find one of the busiest places in the city, on the Spaarne.
“Here”, says Landsberg, “in Teyler’s time it was a very busy place, where trade entered and left Haarlem. It is called the Sleepershoofd. At the Spaarne you have to imagine a bunch of masts. All the ships that had to be in Haarlem , or in the area, had to have their goods weighed at the Waag, here on the corner.”
tax evasion
The goods were removed from the ships or loaded into them with a large crane. The goods were then stacked on horse-drawn sledges and taken to the Grote Markt to be traded. Sleepershoofd gets its name from that. Landsberg: “The scumbags and the grease polishes ensured that the irons under the slides were smeared with grease so that they could slide more easily over the paving stones.”
In those days you paid wheel tax, a kind of road tax, but if you didn’t have wheels, you didn’t have to pay.
According to Landsberg, if Pieter Teyler were to return to his house, he would easily recognize the area again: “He would certainly recognize it, because so much has not changed. The houses are still there. His home is still there. there still and the Spaarne. The roads, the infrastructure to the city and to the Spaarne, have remained almost exactly the same.”
Look here for more episodes of De Verdwenen Stad Haarlem.
