North of the red light district is the Zeedijk, the original sea dyke that curved from the mouth of the Amstel to Nieuwmarkt Square and continued from there along what are now St Anthoniesbreestraat, Jodenbreestraat and Muiderstraat. The house at Zeedijk I dates from the mid 1500s and is one of two timber fronted houses still left in the city (another, older one is in the Begijnhof).
The Zeedijk used to be (and to some extent still is) a street of wine, women and song, the first port of call for sailors after their long voyages. In the 1950s, wine and song predominated and many of the world's great jazz musicians played in pubs such as the Casablanca at No 26. In the 1970s the street's dubious reputation hit rock bottom when it became the centre of Amsterdam's heroin trade. A massive police campaign in the mid I 980s restored some of the old merriment and legitimate business is beginning to pick up again, but so too is the heroin trade at the Nieuwmarkt end of the street.
Fast of the Zeedijk is the Geldersekade, and at the tip of this canal is a small brick tower, dating from around 1480, that used to form part of the city fortifications. It's the oldest such tower still standing and is called the Schreierstoren from an old Dutch word for 'sharp', a reference to this sharp comer that jutted out into the IJ. Tourist literature calls it the 'wailing tower'(from schreien, to weep or wail) and claims that sailors' wives stood here and cried their lungs out when ships set off for distant lands, which makes a far more interesting story. The women even have a plaque dedicated to them.
The tower attracts plaques: another one explains that the English captain Henry Hudson set sail from here in 1609 in his ship the Halve Maen (Half Moon). The United East India Company had enlisted him to find a northern passage to the East Indies, but instead he bought Manhattan and explored the river that bears his name.
On the return voyage his ship was seized in England and he was ordered never again to sail for a foreign nation. His reports, however, made it back to base, and in 1614 the Dutch established a fort on Manhattan that developed into a settlement called New Amsterdam. In 1664 the West India Company's local governor, the fanatically Calvinist Pieter Stuyvesant, surrendered the town to the British who promptly renamed it New York. Stuyvesant retired to the market garden called Bouwerij (Agriculture), now known as the Bowery section of New York City.
North of the red light district is the Zeedijk, the original sea dyke that curved from the mouth of the Amstel to Nieuwmarkt Square and continued from there along what are now St Anthoniesbreestraat, Jodenbreestraat and Muiderstraat. The house at Zeedijk I dates from the mid 1500s and is one of two timber fronted houses still left in the city (another, older one is in the Begijnhof).
Fast of the Zeedijk is the Geldersekade, and at the tip of this canal is a small brick tower, dating from around 1480, that used to form part of the city fortifications. It's the oldest such tower still standing and is called the Schreierstoren from an old Dutch word for 'sharp', a reference to this sharp comer that jutted out into the IJ. Tourist literature calls it the 'wailing tower'(from schreien, to weep or wail) and claims that sailors' wives stood here and cried their lungs out when ships set off for distant lands, which makes a far more interesting story. The women even have a plaque dedicated to them.
