Stopera

From the river you see the opera house: a curved white front with tall windows, under a drum of red brick. The long brick wings behind it, towards the Waterlooplein, are Amsterdam’s city hall. It is one building, and its name says so. Stopera is stadhuis, the Dutch word for city hall, joined to opera.

It was not meant to be one. The city chose this spot for a new city hall in 1954. A competition in the 1960s drew 803 designs, and the winner was an Austrian architect, Wilhelm Holzbauer. The opera house was a separate plan, for another part of town. Neither got built. In 1979 the national government refused to help pay for a city hall on its own, and the two plans were joined. The Dutch architect Cees Dam took on the opera half.

The ground had a history. This was Vlooienburg, an island made in the Amstel around 1600 and the heart of the old Jewish quarter. In the Second World War its Jewish residents were deported, and most were murdered. Most of the houses were pulled down after 1945, and the last ones went to make room for this building.

Many Amsterdammers did not want it. When the first pile was driven, on 5 July 1982, opponents wrecked machines and set building materials on fire. The opera house opened in 1986 and the city moved in two years later. The bill was 467 million guilders, more than a hundred million over budget.

In 1988 the city hall was given a monument to NAP, the zero level from which heights in the Netherlands are measured. Three columns of water were set into the floor of its public passage. Two were made to show the tide on the coast at that moment, the third the flood of 1953. The bronze bolt that marks zero is in the basement, because zero lies below the floor. Where you are standing, Amsterdam is above sea level.

“The bronze bolt that marks zero is in the basement, because zero lies below the floor.”