The Jordaan grew from Amsterdam’s 1613 western expansion, where older polder lines shaped a dense artisan neighborhood beside the grand canal ring. Its angled streets, courtyards and renewed homes reflect centuries of work, crowding, protest and repair.
Quick facts
The Jordaan was laid out largely between 1613 and 1620 as Amsterdam’s artisan quarter, “Het Nieuwe Werck,” using many pre-existing field boundaries and ditches.
A 2003 excavation in Konijnenstraat uncovered foundations of eight seventeenth-century buildings; household cesspit finds included Chinese and Japanese porcelain.
During the 1934 Jordaan uprising, triggered by a 10 percent cut in unemployment benefits, five people died and 56 were seriously injured.
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Guide
At the assigned pin, you are on Egelantiersgracht, in the Jordaan neighborhood of Amsterdam-Centrum. The canal and the streets beside it make the neighborhood’s story visible: a seventeenth-century expansion was built on a polder landscape, but its pattern did not follow the grand, concentric geometry of the neighboring canal ring. The Jordaan’s lanes still keep some of the older field lines.
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