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Pieter Goemansbrug: Bridge 93 and the Song About the Canals

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Pieter Goemansbrug, Bridge 93, crossing the Leidsegracht from the Prinsengracht

The Song Bridge: Brug 93 and the Man Who Wrote About the Canals

If one song stands for Amsterdam, it is Aan de Amsterdamse grachten, written in 1949 and sung most famously by Wim Sonneveld. The man who wrote the words was Pieter Goemans, and he is said to have found them at this canal. Bridge 93 carries his name.

Etymology: Three Names, Two Institutions and a Song

The bridge was named the Pieter Goemansbrug in 2007 and 2008, which makes it a recent name on a very old crossing.

Before that it was the Bestedelingenbrug or Bestedelingensluis. A besteding was a placement, and the Bestedelingenhuis was the institution nearby that housed people placed into care at public expense, a poorhouse in plain terms. It was merged into the Palace of Justice in 1950.

So the bridge went from being named after a poorhouse to being named after a love song about the canals, which is as neat a summary of Amsterdam’s twentieth century as any bridge offers.

Structural Evolution: The Bridge They Chose Not to Prettify

A crossing has been here for centuries, drawn by Daniel Stalpaert on his map of 1662. The structure that matters dates from about 1894, an iron girder bridge attributed to Willem Springer.

In 1987 and 1988 it was renovated, and the decision taken then is the most interesting thing about it.

Amsterdam’s habit in the late twentieth century, when a nineteenth-century iron bridge came up for renewal in the historic centre, was to replace it with a stone arch. An arch looks older, fits the seventeenth-century streetscape, and satisfies the expectation that a canal bridge should be humped and made of masonry.

Here the city did not do that. It rebuilt the girder bridge in steel, keeping the form of the 1894 structure rather than dressing the crossing up as something two centuries older than it was.

That is a small act of honesty, and a rare one. Much of what looks convincingly old in the canal ring is nineteenth or twentieth-century work wearing a seventeenth-century costume. Brug 93 is a Victorian iron bridge that is still allowed to look like one.

Urban Context: The Leidsegracht

The bridge carries the western bank of the Prinsengracht over the Leidsegracht, a short canal cut through to link the ring to the Leidse routes out of the city. It is one of the quieter and more expensive stretches of central Amsterdam, and it is exactly the sort of view the song is about.

Whether Goemans really wrote the lyric here is not documented beyond the tradition, which is the usual situation with a story attached to a place after the fact. The naming committee accepted it, and the bridge now carries the claim in municipal ironwork.

The Song

Aan de Amsterdamse grachten was written in 1949 and became, over the following decades, something close to a municipal anthem. Wim Sonneveld‘s recording is the definitive one, and the song is still sung at moments when Amsterdam wants to be sentimental about itself in public.

What makes it durable is that it is about the canals as a place to live rather than a place to visit. The lyric is domestic, not touristic, and it belongs to a post-war city that had just come through occupation and hunger and was in no mood to romanticise anything it had not earned.

A bridge is an apt monument for it. Goemans has no statue, and the naming committee gave him a crossing on the canal the song is about instead, which is a more Amsterdam sort of tribute than a statue would have been.

Willem Springer

Willem Springer, to whom the 1894 structure is attributed, was assistant to the city architect Bastiaan de Greef and one of the more consequential figures in Amsterdam’s nineteenth-century infrastructure. The pair are behind the Blauwbrug of 1883, and Springer’s decorative ironwork recurs across the city, including the eierdoppen, the egg-cup ornaments, on nearby Brug 97.

His work is the layer of Amsterdam that most people mistake for older than it is: iron balustrades, hardstone piers and cast ornament, produced in quantity between about 1870 and 1900 and now read as simply part of the historic city.

Technical Specifications

  • Bridge number: 93
  • Name: Pieter Goemansbrug, named 2007 to 2008
  • Former names: Bestedelingenbrug, Bestedelingensluis
  • Type: Iron girder bridge, rebuilt in steel
  • Carries: Prinsengracht, western bank
  • Spans: Leidsegracht
  • District: Amsterdam-Centrum
  • Coordinates: 52.3661 N, 4.8825 E
  • Earliest record: Stalpaert’s map of 1662
  • Iron girder bridge: circa 1894, attributed to Willem Springer
  • Renovated: 1987 to 1988, rebuilt as steel rather than replaced with a stone arch
  • Named for: Pieter Goemans, lyricist of Aan de Amsterdamse grachten (1949)

Sources Consulted