The Single-Span Companion to the Leliesluis, and the Sluice Complex That Once Marked the City’s Edge
Bridge 62 sits on the eastern bank of the Prinsengracht and carries that quay across the Leliegracht. It is the quieter half of a pair. Thirty metres away, Bridge 61 — the Leliesluis — carries the Leliegracht over the Prinsengracht in the opposite direction, and it is the one that got the name, the photographs and the tourists. Bridge 62 does the same structural job at right angles and has never been called anything but its number.
The two bridges look alike because they share a history of renewal and renovation, and the family resemblance is deliberate. The obvious difference is the count of spans: Bridge 61 has three, Bridge 62 has one. That is not an aesthetic choice but an arithmetic one. The Prinsengracht is a main ring canal and much wider than the radial Leliegracht, so the bridge crossing it needs more arches to get to the other side.
Etymology and Naming: The Sluice Whose Name Went to the Other Bridge
Bridge 62 forms the end of what was once the Leliesluis — a genuine sluice complex dating from the period when the Prinsengracht marked the outer edge of the city and water levels on either side of it needed managing. That is the crucial point about the name. There really was a sluice here, and “Leliesluis” was originally a description of infrastructure rather than a decorative label.
When the sluice function disappeared and the name survived, it did not settle on this bridge. It transferred to Bridge 61, the crossing over the Prinsengracht, leaving Bridge 62 — arguably the more direct descendant of the sluice works — anonymous. Amsterdam’s bridge names are full of these small injustices of inheritance, where the name lands on the more visible structure rather than the more historically entitled one.
Structural Evolution: Berckenrode’s Map of 1625 and the Skippers Who Lost the Argument
A crossing has stood here for four centuries. Balthasar Florisz. van Berckenrode’s map of 1625 already shows a bridge at this point, described in the spelling of the day as crossing the Lely Graft in the Prince Graft. The bridge is therefore contemporary with the digging of the canal ring itself, not a later addition to a finished city.
The most revealing episode in its history is an argument it lost. At the end of the nineteenth century the municipality proposed lowering the bridge. Ships’ captains protested — a lowered bridge means less clearance beneath, and less clearance means smaller cargo, or a longer route, or no route at all for the tallest vessels. The council voted for the lowering anyway, in favour of land traffic.
That vote is worth dwelling on, because it is the moment in miniature when Amsterdam stopped being a city organised around its water and started being one organised around its streets. The same decision was taken at bridge after bridge through the same decades, each time with the same trade-off and usually the same outcome. The canals kept their beauty and lost their primacy. The skippers of the Prinsengracht were not being unreasonable; they were simply on the losing side of a structural shift in how the city moved goods.
Wider Context: What It Means to Be a Bridge Without a Name
Amsterdam has well over a thousand bridges, and for most of the city’s history only a minority carried official names. By the mid-2010s roughly a quarter of the city’s bridges were named; more than 1,300 were not. Many of the unnamed ones had informal names anyway — names used by locals, printed on old maps, attached to a nearby building or trade — without ever being formally adopted by the city.
In July 2016 the municipality set about tidying this up, formally recognising a number of long-used unofficial names and removing 88 others that could not be substantiated or that risked confusion with existing places. A public initiative followed, inviting residents to propose names for the unnamed spans; some 1,500 suggestions were submitted and around a hundred adopted. Bridges in this part of the Prinsengracht have been renamed under that programme — Bridge 67, a few crossings south, received the name Angenietje Swarthofbrug in December 2021.
Bridge 62 has so far not been part of that wave. It remains a number, which is not a mark of insignificance so much as of the sheer scale of the city’s bridge stock. A crossing can be four hundred years old, sit at the mouth of a former sluice complex, appear on the most famous map of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, and still be waiting for someone to give it a name.
Technical Specifications
- Bridge number: 62
- Name: None (unnamed)
- Type: Fixed bridge
- Spans: Leliegracht
- Carries: Prinsengracht (eastern bank)
- Spans (count): One (compared with three on Bridge 61)
- First recorded: Berckenrode map, 1625
- Lowered: Late nineteenth century, over objections from skippers
- Related structure: Terminus of the former Leliesluis sluice complex
Sources Consulted
- Brug 62, Nederlandstalige Wikipedia
- Leliesluis, Nederlandstalige Wikipedia
- Balthasar Florisz. van Berckenrode, map of Amsterdam, 1625
- Gemeente Amsterdam, bridge naming decisions of July 2016
- Bruggen van Amsterdam
History and information
Map and location
