The disappeared city: Leidseplein still the place for entertainment

In the depot of the City Archives of Amsterdam, Harmen Snel finds a map showing the Leidseplein as Gerrit Lamberts drew it, i.e. with the old Schouwburg and the Leidsepoort. The latter was so called because you left the city through this gate and started the route to Leiden.

Snel: “It was not the first theater by the way, because there had already been a theater since the 1930s. It was on Keizersgracht. But it had burned down and they built a new one on Leidseplein.”

The City Archives currently has an exhibition devoted to Lamberts’ drawings (on display until 31 July). “Lamberts was active in the first half of the nineteenth century,” says Harmen Snel as we walk along the exhibited works with him. “If you are looking for images of Amsterdam from that time, you will immediately come to Lamberts. Every time.” The drawing of the Leidseplein, which we are looking for, is also there.

With Lamberts’ drawing in hand, well, a copy of it, we are standing in the same place with Floor van Spaendonck and Gijs Stork, but then two hundred years later. The loyal readers of The watchword know this duo well from the weekly city walks they take for the newspaper. They were also asked to take such a walk at the exhibition. That eventually became an entire book of walks based on Lamberts’ drawings.

Theater made of wood

“It was a wooden theatre,” says Floor. “There were clocks in that Leidsepoort. To keep the silence in that theatre, the walls were filled with sawdust. Whether that worked at all, I don’t know.”

This theater dates from 1774 to a design by Jacob de Witte. It was a completely wooden construction and was therefore nicknamed the wooden cupboard. The building was once erected here as a temporary solution, but a hundred years later it is still there. Then it was decided to radically renovate the fire-hazardous building and to provide it with stone outer walls. But these interventions did not prevent the theater from going up in flames in 1890. There were no casualties. But the entire archive, library, costumes and sets were lost. Four years later, the current city theater was built.

Panorama

The drawing by Gerrit Lamberts also shows a kind of tent. Here was a panorama of the Battle of Waterloo. Shortly before, in 1815, Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo by troops from England, Hanover, Prussia and the Netherlands. Waterloo was then a town in the Southern Netherlands. Our country had been occupied by the French until 1814.

The view of Amsterdam was another subject on display in the Panorama Building. Lamberts’ drawing shows the view of Amsterdam from the Haringpakkerstoren, near the station.

decay

You would think that Lamberts would be shocked if he could see how Leidseplein has changed, but according to Gijs Stolk that is not the case: “Lamberts loved the changing city very much. He made a whole series of drawings of buildings that are being demolished. Then he then signs the construction site and the new building. I think he would have loved it. Also what’s going on behind this.” Gijs points to the gaping hole in the square where the Heinekenhoek used to be. The decline of the city after the Napoleonic era was also a favorite subject for Lamberts.

Of all the locations in the city where Floor and Gijs came for the book, Leidseplein is their favorite place.

Floor: “It is a place where you know that so much has changed, but it still feels like that square from back then. You still have those places of entertainment and that Schouwburg. Everything is different, but at the same time the basis of that former structure is still very much true. It’s still a buzzing place.”

Look here for more episodes of The Lost City

This is the last installment of this series. The next series can be seen from the end of October and will be about Haarlem.