Have an already nostalgic trip through the Amsterdam Noord of roughly a decade ago when its hipsterfication was just getting into full swing. Soundtrack by Harry Slinger and friends, one of Amsterdam Noord’s more famous sons.
In 2003 II was still living in student accommodation in Amstelveen, just over the border of Amsterdam. A very nice, cheap flat but too small for two people and when Sandra decided she wanted to move out of England to come live with me, the hunt was on for a bigger, cheap apartment we could rent. What ended up happening was that we semi-legally rented the living space attached to the office of a local political party that shall remain anonymous. This was not sustainable, especially after said party moved their offices into the centre of Amsterdam, away from Noord. Renting a new flat was impossible, so instead we ended up buying the cheapest house we could afford on my shitty salary back then. In 2005 therefore we moved from the west side of Amsterdam Noord, over the canal to the east side, to the Vogelbuurt, just off the Meeuwenlaan.
The new house was ex-social housing, built just after the First World War, intended as housing for the workers of the factories had been established there not long before. When we bought the house, many of these factories and workspaces were still there, just across the road from us. Amsterdam Noord, across the IJ away from the rest of the city, was seen as both not quite Amsterdam and one of its worst parts. Lots of cheap housing, not that much to do and for anything really interesting you have to take the ferry into the city proper. The people living there were a mixture of proper Amsterdammers who had been born and been living there ever since, various generations of migrants looking for cheap housing (and sometimes unofficially banned from other parts of the city) and people like us, only able to afford the housing there even if it wasn’t our first choice.
Eighteen years later and what was once industrial wasteland is now a hipster paradise. There are three different microbrew brewpubs in crawling distance of our house, house prices have literally tripled since we bought ours and Noord is hot. The old Noord is still there, but it is slowly being smothered under the influence of money and bourgeois tastes, gentrified.
I wish I could honestly say that this is the reason I’m moving out, but I’d be lying. The real reason is that having worked from home for the last three years and plan to continue doing so, my parents are not getting any younger and I could really do with a little bit more room in my house. All of which means I will be moving back to my birthplace in less than a month’s time, 500 metres from where my parents still live.
Today I set my signature to sell my house. The end of an era. Eighteen years I’ve lived here in Noord and I will miss it, but not enough to not move away.
