A Long Stretch of Water With No Crossing
Walk the Herengracht from the Leidsestraat to the Vijzelstraat and you pass the grandest run of houses in Amsterdam without once being able to cross the canal. The stretch is called the Gouden Bocht, the Golden Bend. At one end the Leidsestraat crosses it on the Koningssluis, bridge 29. At the other the Vijzelstraat crosses it on the Isa van Eeghenbrug, bridge 30. In between, where the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat meets the canal at the bend itself, there is no bridge at all.
A tidy story is often told to explain this: the rich residents of the bend lobbied the city to keep bridges, traffic and the lower classes away from their front doors. It is a good story, and an earlier version of this page told it. No source this site has found supports it. What the sources do show is more interesting, and it starts with how the bend was made.
How the Bend Was Made
Until 1663 the Herengracht stopped at what is now the Leidsegracht. That year the city began the last phase of its great seventeenth-century expansion, the Vierde Uitleg or Fourth Expansion. The land was compulsorily purchased and the canal ring was extended east towards the Amstel. At the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat the Herengracht was given a kink, and that kink is the bend.
Because the three main canals were laid a little further apart here than in the older western part of the ring, the plots on the south side of the Herengracht came out deeper than usual. They were sold between 1664 and 1668, and the burgomasters encouraged buyers to take two plots at once. On these double plots the wealthy built wide, stately houses with classical façades, several of them designed by Adriaan Dortsman and Philips Vingboons, with marble hallways and painted ceilings by artists such as Gerard de Lairesse and Jacob de Wit. Most of the bend was built up between 1667 and 1672.
The painter Gerrit Berckheyde recorded it as it went up. He drew the bend twice and painted it four times. In what appears to be the earliest painting, from 1671 or 1672, many plots are still empty. In the version dated 1685 the street walls are complete.
Main Roads and Side Streets
The bridges of the canal ring were never spread evenly. They follow the streets, and the streets of the Fourth Expansion were not all equal. The Leidsestraat and the Utrechtsestraat were uitvalswegen, main roads out of the city, each running to a city gate. They carried through traffic, and they got bridges over every canal they crossed.
The southern part of the Vijzelstraat, between the Herengracht and the Prinsengracht, was laid out in the same expansion, but Dutch Wikipedia describes it as a narrower neighbourhood street, “comparable with the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat”, and not a road out of town. The Nieuwe Spiegelstraat itself runs south from the bend.
That is as far as the sources go. None that this site has found records a decision not to build a bridge at the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat, a petition from residents, or a debate in the council. The absence of a crossing is consistent with a street plan in which the main roads got bridges and the side streets often did not. It is not evidence of a campaign.
When Did the Vijzelstraat Get Its Bridge?
Here the sources disagree with each other. The Dutch Wikipedia article on bridge 30 says there has been a bridge at the Vijzelstraat since around 1727, which would mean the bend had no crossing at its eastern end for half a century after it was built. The article on Berckheyde’s painting of 1671 to 1672, on the other hand, says the view was taken from the bridge in the Vijzelstraat. Both cannot be right, and this site has not yet been able to settle it from the maps.
What is certain is the bridge’s later history. It was lowered and widened around 1882. As traffic on the Vijzelstraat grew in the early twentieth century, Jo van der Mey of the Public Works department drew new designs for its three bridges, 30, 41 and 70, and Piet Kramer reworked them around 1919. In 2016 bridge 30 was named after Isabella Henriette van Eeghen, archivist and historian at the city archives, which since 2007 have been housed in the De Bazel building right beside it.
What About the Water?
The earlier version of this page also claimed that the water near the Amstel was under too much pressure for a bridge here, and that building one would have meant building a lock. The sources point the other way. When the city architect Daniël Stalpaert drew the planned expansion on his map of 1662, he showed locks in the Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht further east, at the Utrechtsestraat, which he described as inner locks “to hold back the water let in from the Amstel”. They were there to control the river, not to prevent bridges. When the Amstelsluizen were built across the Amstel in 1673, those canal locks lost their purpose. Today the crossing at the Utrechtsestraat is bridge 34, an ordinary fixed bridge.
The Bend Since
The bend is no longer complete. When the Vijzelstraat was widened from 1917, the west side of the street was demolished, and several seventeenth-century canal houses on the Herengracht just west of the Vijzelstraat went with it. Their place at the eastern end of the bend is now taken by early twentieth-century buildings, among them the De Bazel building.
Among the houses that remain are the Huis van de Graeff at number 446, the former town palace of the regent Andries de Graeff, and Huis De Neufville at number 475, built in 1731 and sometimes called the finest house on the bend. From 1858 to 1926 the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij had its head office at number 466, on the corner of the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat. Few of the houses are lived in now. Most are offices of banks and insurers, publishers and cultural institutions, among them the Goethe-Institut and the Kattenkabinet, a cat museum on the main floor of number 497.
Seeing It
The best way to see the bend is the way Berckheyde did: from the bridge. Stand on the Isa van Eeghenbrug and look west along the curve. Then walk the north quay to the Koningssluis and come back along the south side, past the double-width houses, and you will have walked the whole of it, crossing only at its ends.
The Herengracht as a whole, with every bridge that crosses it, is covered in the Herengracht guide, and every bridge documented so far is listed in the bridge index.
Corrections
Updated November 2026. This page has been rewritten. The earlier version said the bend lay between bridges 22 and 24, which are elsewhere on the Herengracht: the bridges at its ends are 29 and 30. It also credited the absence of a bridge to lobbying by the residents, to a “bridge ban” and to the Public Works department, which was not founded until 1856, and claimed hydraulic reasons. None of this is supported by the sources listed below, and it has been removed.
Sources Consulted
- Gouden Bocht, Nederlandstalige Wikipedia
- Gezicht op de Gouden Bocht in de Herengracht (Berckheyde), Nederlandstalige Wikipedia
- Vijzelstraat, Nederlandstalige Wikipedia
- Koningssluis, Nederlandstalige Wikipedia
- Isa van Eeghenbrug, Nederlandstalige Wikipedia
- Brug 34, Nederlandstalige Wikipedia
- Uitleg van Amsterdam in de 17e eeuw, Nederlandstalige Wikipedia
- Herengracht, Nederlandstalige Wikipedia
- Featured image: Gerrit Berckheyde, De bocht van de Herengracht te Amsterdam, 1685, Rijksmuseum, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain