Noorderkerk

The merchants on the canals got the Westerkerk, with the tallest church tower in the city. The people who worked for them got this: a church with no tower at all, and a better idea.

When Amsterdam built its canal ring, it built a second district beside it for everyone the ring had no room for. The Jordaan was where the dyers, tanners, carpenters and labourers lived, in narrow streets laid along old ditches. The Westerkerk stood at its edge, but that was the rich people’s church. So in 1620 the city ordered another one, for the north of the district.

Hendrick de Keyser designed both at the same time, and he made them as different as their congregations. For the Westerkerk he used the long plan of a traditional church. Here he tried something new. A Protestant service is a sermon, and the best building for a sermon is one where everybody sits close to the pulpit. He drew a cross with four short, equal arms and put the pulpit in the middle. It became a model for Protestant churches across the country.

De Keyser died a year into the work and his son Pieter finished it.

The square around the church has been a market for four centuries. It has another place in the city’s memory too. In February 1941, after the first round-ups of Jewish men, the organisers of the strike that followed called their open-air meetings here.