Amstelhof

For more than three hundred years old people lived behind this very long wall. The last of them moved out in 2007.

It began with a will. Barent Helleman, a rich merchant, died in 1680 and left about 90,000 guilders to the Reformed Church. The city gave the land. With that the church’s deacons, who looked after its poor, built a home for old women here in the early 1680s. The design was by the city carpenter, Hans Petersom.

The stone tablet over the door still carries its first name and a year: Diaconie Oude Vrouwen Huys, 1681. Amsterdam had a shorter name for it, the Besjeshuis, the old women’s house.

The grand doorway is not quite what it seems. The story is that the burgomasters thought a building of this standing needed an entrance with steps. But the church hall lies directly behind the door, so it could never be the way in.

At first only women lived here. Men were admitted later. The name Amstelhof is much younger than the building: it dates from 1953.

By the 1990s the place no longer suited nursing care. The last residents left in 2007, and in June 2009 it opened as Hermitage Amsterdam, a branch of the museum in Saint Petersburg. Queen Beatrix and the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, performed the opening. In March 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the museum cut that tie. Since 1 September 2023 it has been the H’ART Museum, and it now works with the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.