Bridge of the Week: Brug 72, Prinsengracht over de Reguliersgracht
Last week we introduced De Duifbrug, Brug 71, named for the Catholic church of the dove just steps along the Prinsengracht quay. This week we move to its closest companion: Brug 72, the bridge on the southern (even-numbered) side of the Reguliersgracht where it crosses the Prinsengracht. It is one of a famous pair of twins, is one of the most photographed bridges in a city of more than a thousand bridges, and carries a history that raises one of the most uncomfortable questions in urban heritage: when does restoration become invention?
Location and Its Twin
Brug 72 and Brug 73 are two fixed bridges in Amsterdam-Centrum, both located in the quays of the Prinsengracht spanning the Reguliersgracht. Brug 73 lies on the city-side (northern, odd-numbered) bank, while Brug 72 lies on the outer side (southern, even-numbered) bank. Rijksmuseum Together the two bridges frame the mouth of the Reguliersgracht where it empties into the broader Prinsengracht, one on each side of the canal’s quay wall. From a passing boat they appear as a matched pair, two red brick arches of near identical design rising and descending in symmetry, though each has its own character in the details.
You cannot write about Brug 72 in isolation. The histories of these two bridges run parallel to that of De Duif, Brug 71, in the quay of the Reguliersgracht over the Prinsengracht. All three were built, replaced, and renovated more or less simultaneously. Bridges 72 and 73 were completed two years earlier than Brug 71, in 1963, because renovation work was also underway at another bridge further out along the Weesperstraat, and all three could not be tackled at the same time. Rijksmuseum The result is a trio of matched brick arches at this canal junction, all of the same 1960s vintage, all wearing the visual language of a much earlier century.
The Nineteenth-Century Bridge: De Greef, Springer, and the Age of the “Liggerbrug”
Before the brick arches you see today, there was an entirely different structure here. For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both Brug 72 and Brug 73 were “liggerbruggen,” flat iron plate bridges, the characteristic product of the city’s great Victorian-era infrastructure drive.
Because of the increase in car production and its popularity at the start of the twentieth century, many high and steep vault bridges were replaced by flat steel bridges, and drawbridges were replaced by fixed bridges. Leidsebuurt In the early twentieth century, many bridges were built and renovated to accommodate increasing traffic. Narrow bridges were widened and humpback bridges replaced by flat bridges. Wikipedia The Prinsengracht crossings at the Reguliersgracht were part of this wave: the original seventeenth-century arched bridges were flattened and widened, and for approximately ninety years the junction that is now celebrated for its romantic arched silhouette was crossed by low, functional, industrial-looking structures.
We know what they looked like. A photograph from 1894 by Jacob Olie, held in the Stadsarchief Amsterdam’s Beeldbank collection under the Jacob Olie Jbz. archive, shows Brug 72 and Brug 71 as flat girder bridges, their decks barely rising above the canal quay walls, the open ironwork of their railings in place of any masonry arch. KNSM Olie, who photographed Amsterdam obsessively from the 1880s until his death in 1905, left behind an invaluable visual record of the city in its industrial-era configuration. The Reguliersgracht junction in his photographs looks strikingly different from what you see today: functional, unromantic, and entirely honest about what the nineteenth century had made of the seventeenth century’s inheritance.
The Kargadoors: A Profession Made Obsolete, Then Forgotten
The replacement of steep arch bridges with flat girder bridges was not merely a matter of aesthetics or traffic management. It quietly extinguished an entire urban profession. On Amsterdam’s steep vault bridges, so-called “bruggentrekkers” or kargadoors were employed to help those passing by pull their barrows across the high arches. A well-known and popular kargadoor was “Kikkie van de Prinsensluis,” who worked at the bridge over the Spiegelgracht. Kikkie de Kargadoor, whose real name was Christiaan Smit, died in 1940 at the age of 82, as the very last of his guild. Leidsebuurt
The kargadoor was a fixture of the seventeenth-century canal city, a human solution to the engineering problem posed by the steep incline of a traditional stone arch. When you had a heavy handcart loaded with barrels, bolts of cloth, or sacks of grain, the hump of a bridge was a real obstacle, and you paid a few coins to a sturdy man stationed at the abutment who would lend his back to the problem. When the arched bridges were replaced by flat spans in the nineteenth century, the profession evaporated, rendered unnecessary by iron and engineering progress. The 1963 restoration of the arches here was in one sense a nod to that lost world, though of course no kargadoors returned with the bricks.
The “Architectonische Leugen”: The Controversy of 1963
This is the heart of the matter, and the reason Brug 72 is more intellectually interesting than its calm, photogenic surface suggests. At the renewal, the bridges were restored to their former glory as arch bridges, after approximately ninety years in the appearance of a flat girder bridge. The approach was described as “terugrestaureren,” meaning “back-restoration,” or as an “architectonische leugen,” an architectural lie. Rijksmuseum
The term is blunt, and that bluntness is appropriate. The Public Works department looked at the flat bridges at this junction and decided they were too plain for one of the most visually significant canal intersections in the city. Rather than maintain or sympathetically repair what was actually there, it chose to demolish the authentic nineteenth-century bridges and replace them with arched structures that had not existed at this spot for nearly a century. The result is a bridge that presents itself as historic but is, in cold structural terms, a postwar concrete and brick construction in period costume.
This was not an unusual impulse in the postwar decades. Across Europe, bomb damage, deferred maintenance, and a renewed appetite for pre-industrial urban character led many cities to rebuild in historicist modes. Amsterdam was not rebuilding from bombing here, but the logic was similar: a vision of what the city ought to look like took precedence over the authentic, if unglamorous, evidence of what it had actually become. The Reguliersgracht had already survived one dramatic threat to its character, when fierce local protests in 1901 successfully blocked plans to fill in the canal entirely to make room for road traffic. Wikipedia The 1963 intervention was a quieter act of reinvention, but an act of reinvention nonetheless.
How you evaluate this depends on your philosophy of heritage. If you believe that authenticity resides in continuous historical development, including its industrial interruptions, then the 1963 arches are a falsification. If you believe that a city has the right to recover a visual character that was lost through expedient decisions, and that a bridge serves its community aesthetically as well as structurally, then the 1963 restoration was an act of civic care. The debate has never been settled, which is perhaps why the Dutch gave it such a precise and unsparing name: the architectural lie.
The Seven Bridges View: Where Brug 72 Earns Its Fame
Whatever your position on the philosophical controversy, there is no denying that Brug 72 plays a crucial and beautiful role in one of Amsterdam’s most celebrated urban vistas. Where the Reguliersgracht crosses the Prinsengracht, you can see the famous seven bridges. At night the illuminations of the bridges give the impression of a tunnel, sometimes called “the tunnel of love.” Mapcarta
The Reguliersgracht was dug in 1658 to link the Herengracht with the canals further south. The canal is famous for its seven bridges. If you stand where it crosses the Herengracht, you can count fifteen bridges in all directions. Wikipedia The seven bridges of the Reguliersgracht are the ones stacked in that famous alignment when seen looking north from the Prinsengracht junction, each arch framing the next in a diminishing perspective. Brug 72 is the southernmost anchor of that alignment, the bridge you are standing on, or standing beside, when the vista begins.
In order to see the bridges of Reguliersgracht fully line up, you need to be at water level, either in a boat or very low to the ground, since the alignment only works from below street height. Tour boats slow down at the corner of the Herengracht precisely to give passengers this view from the water. Bruggenvanamsterdam From the deck of Brug 72 itself, you look north along the Reguliersgracht and see the arches of Brug 73 just in front of you, and beyond it the next bridge, and the next, the canal houses closing in on either side. It is not quite the full seven-bridge alignment from this vantage, but it is still one of the most richly layered canal views in the city, and at night, when each arch glows with its fitted illumination, the effect is unmistakable.
Photo tip for readers: for the full alignment, join a canal boat tour and ask the skipper to navigate the Reguliersgracht from its junction with the Prinsengracht northward. From a seated position on the boat, just above the waterline, all seven arches align with extraordinary clarity. The seven bridges view is best experienced from the water, where the perspective allows you to look directly through the tunnel of arches. From the same intersection on the Herengracht, facing in different directions, it is possible to count fifteen bridges simultaneously. Bruggenvanamsterdam
The Neighbourhood: A Wooden Church That Was Never Replaced
The immediate surroundings of Brug 72 are as layered as the bridge’s own history. Steps from the southern abutment, the Amstelveld opens into one of the most peaceful squares in central Amsterdam, anchored by the extraordinary Amstelkerk.
The Amstelkerk was designed by Daniël Stalpaert and was originally intended as a wooden emergency church, erected to provide church services in the fourth Golden Age extension of Amsterdam laid out in 1662. It was never replaced by a more permanent building. Amsterdam.info The emergency wooden church was so simplistic that the population referred to it as “a preaching barn.” It opened in 1670, still unpainted pine back then. Three years later, two brick extensions were added: a home for the sexton and a bakery for the poor. Wikimedia Commons More than 350 years on, the Amstelkerk still stands, now painted white rather than its original oxblood red, used for concerts, offices, and the restaurant Nel. During the French occupation, Napoleon used the building to keep his horses. Alamy That a structure intended to last a decade has endured three and a half centuries is perhaps the most Amsterdam story imaginable: improvisation that becomes permanence, the temporary outlasting everything planned to replace it.
Just along the Prinsengracht quay from Brug 72 stands De Duif, the church whose name Brug 71 carries. When the ban on Catholic churches was finally lifted in 1855, a wave of new Catholic houses of worship were built, of which De Duif was one of the first, completed in 1858. Wikipedia Together, the Amstelkerk and De Duif frame this stretch of the Prinsengracht as a place where religious history and civic compromise are written into stone, wood, and brick at every turn.
And at the corner house of Prinsengracht and Reguliersgracht, look up above the door: a stork is carved into the seventeenth-century corner house. It belonged to a midwife who had her practice there. In the Netherlands, a stork displayed above a door signals a new birth. Mapcarta The advertising sign has outlasted its advertiser by three centuries and is now, inadvertently, one of the most photographed decorative details on the entire canal.
Why Brug 72 Matters
Brug 72 is a beautiful bridge that asks an uncomfortable question. Its 1963 brick arches are photogenic, beloved, and utterly consistent with everything around them. They provide the southern anchor for one of the most iconic views in the Netherlands. They replaced something that was, by any honest measure, historically authentic and visually unimpressive.
The term “architectonische leugen” is not a verdict so much as a provocation. Every city that has ever been rebuilt, restored, or simply loved by its citizens into a preferred shape has told versions of this lie. The question is whether you tell it knowingly, and whether the result is worth it. Standing on Brug 72 on a summer evening, with the Reguliersgracht’s arches receding north in the last of the light and the Amstelkerk glowing white across the Amstelveld, it is very difficult to argue that Amsterdam got this one wrong.
Primary sources and citations: Wikipedia (nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brug_72), bruggenvanamsterdam.nl, Stadsarchief Amsterdam Beeldbank (Jacob Olie Jbz. collection, 1894 photograph of Brug 72 and Brug 71); Grachtenmuseum Amsterdam (grachten.museum/en/bridges/), on the kargadoor profession; Frank V. Smit, “Bruggen in Amsterdam” (Matrijs, 2008), cited as the primary print source in the Wikipedia article on Brug 72; Stadsherstel Amsterdam (stadsherstel.nl) and Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstelkerk) on the Amstelkerk; MforAmsterdam Tours (mforamsterdam.com/amstelveld-amstelkerk/) drawing on the Dreesman Atlas, Stadsarchief Amsterdam, 1783 (Pierre Fouquet illustration of the Amstelkerk from the Reguliersgracht corner).
Featured image Door Alf van Beem – Eigen werk, Publiek domein, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61366130