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A TALE OF TWO AMSTERDAMS

The week I spent with my daughter in Amsterdam was unlike our previous travel adventures. Celia took the lead in planning and guiding, having visited the city on two other occasions. This year her short animated film, Baby Bros, was in competition at the city's annual Kaboom Animation Festival. Roughly 200 young people from 58 countries gathered to view as many of the 165 animated and VF films as possible. The films were grouped in 9 categories, all of them focused on the this year’s theme: provocation. Screenings bore titles like “Your Yuck is My Yumm” and “Punk it Louder”. Baby Bros was among 13 short films titled “Bonkers Shorts”. You get the idea. 

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The festival was held in the stunning, white Eye Filmmuseum located on the northern shore of the IJ River directly across from Amsterdam’s Centraal Station and easily accessible on a free ferry. The museum and the adjacent 22-story Shell tower represent the new face of the city. After Shell moved its headquarters to the United Kingdom in 1999, this 19 square mile borough consisting of open land and waterways known as Amsterdam-Noord has seen the growth of high-rise developments that accommodate Amsterdam’s growing population. What was formerly the Shell tower has become a focus of the city’s music culture. It houses the audio-themed hotel where we stayed, a music school, the offices of Sony, a revolving restaurant, rooftop bar and an observation deck fitted with swings that offer a commanding view of the Dutch landscape. 

When we were not asleep or watching animated films, Celia and I explored the intact and carefully updated Amsterdam of the 17th century on the south side of the river.  Here were the picturesque rows of narrow buildings with large curtain-less windows overlooking canals strung like concentric rows of beads from the IJ River, all of them with boats moored along the banks. There may be more cars than boats in Amsterdam, but there are almost four times as many bicycles as cars. A highly integrated system of trains, buses and a metro make the museums and markets scattered around the city very accessible. The reduced noise and air pollution gives gives the city a calm, museum quality except for the times when it becomes a playground for European students on holiday. Amsterdam is renown for its red light district and coffee houses where cannabis and other soft drugs are sold. Celia and I were careful to limit our experimentation to rijsttafel meals from Tibet, Nepal, the Punjab and Indonesia, Dutch beer and stroopwaffles.

 

 On our last day in Amsterdam we walked north from the hotel through high-rise neighborhoods and an eco-friendly community of houses on an inland waterway to an enormous former shipbuilding shed. In 2000 a group of artists, artisans and skaters offered a plan to turn this 20,000 meter square space into a cultural yard today known today at NDSM LOODS, a multi-leveled space with studios for 200 artists including an artisan sourdough bread baking operation,  The giant crane that reigns over the center of the yard has been reborn as the hip Faralda Hotel that boasts a swimming pool at the top level. The nearby Straat Museum, dedicated to street art and graffiti is filled with paintings so massive they have to be painted on the site.
 
 

Visitors that walk through Amsterdam-Noord are rewarded with a sense of creative energy in the mix of new construction with repurposed industrial icons. The city is committed to constructing 52,500 homes by the end of this year with the focus on social housing and medium-priced rentals. It's present population is over 108,000. slightly less than 10% of city's total. The goal of Amsterdam's Comprehensive Vision is to integrate greenery, housing, employment, sustainability in support of a comfortable quality of life by 2050.