When the Dutch economy boomed in the 1860s, the city's old canal-side mansions were no longer enough — too cramped, too unfashionable, too far from a railway. The wealthy commissioned a new neighborhood south of the Singelgracht, and christened it the Museum Quarter after the giant they were about to build at its heart: the Rijksmuseum, opened in 1885, with its red-and-gold neo-Gothic profile and the affectionate nickname "Rijks" that Amsterdammers still use today. Locals will tell you it is the British Museum and the Louvre rolled into one, only with better Vermeers. Across the Museumplein lawn stands the Van Gogh Museum, holder of the largest collection of the post-impressionist's paintings and drawings on Earth. Next door, the Stedelijk wears its bathtub-shaped extension and houses one of Europe's strongest collections of modern art. P.C. Hooftstraat runs alongside, lined with the kind of boutiques where Dutch celebrities buy designer shoes — and the Vondelpark spreads out behind, eighty acres of joggers, picnickers, and parakeets that escaped a pet shop in the 1970s and never left.

Just east, in a grid of long terraced streets, lies De Pijp. The story of how it nearly became something else is worth telling. In the 1860s the city planner Van Niftrik drew up a grand scheme for an area then known only as "neighbourhood YY": railway running through the middle, Amsterdam Centraal sited here, broad Parisian avenues, residential blocks for the wealthy. The city council balked at the land purchases and the plan died. Instead, in 1876, planner Kalff produced a cheaper grid for revolutiebouw — "revolution building," the speculative tenement architecture of the late 19th century — to house Amsterdam's expanding working class. The result is the De Pijp of today: long narrow streets, four-story brick walk-ups, and at its center the Albert Cuyp Market, a 1.5-kilometer ribbon of stalls selling herring, kibbeling, fabric, flowers, cheese, and Indonesian peanut sauce. The neighborhood has gentrified hard; students, young professionals, and immigrants now share the corner cafes that once belonged to dockworkers. Heineken's original brewery, just off the Stadhouderskade, ran here until 1988 and is now a museum about itself.

South of De Pijp the city changes scale again. Between 1917 and 1927, the architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage laid out Nieuw-Zuid — New South — to a single coherent plan, in the broad-shouldered brick style that came to be called the Amsterdam School. Streets curve. Blocks have civic ambition. The 1928 Summer Olympics happened here, on grounds and avenues that still carry Greek names; the Olympic Stadium itself, designed by Jan Wils, survives as a working sports venue. South of Berlage's plan, in the postwar decades, Amsterdam kept absorbing surrounding municipalities — Buitenveldert, where Korean shops and restaurants now anchor a small culinary community, was one of them.

And then, since the late 1990s, the southernmost edge of Zuid has been growing skyward. The Zuidas, sometimes called the Financial Mile, is Amsterdam's central business district — glass towers around the railway station, headquarters for ABN AMRO and the major Dutch law firms, the VU University campus just to the south, and a sense of vertical ambition that the historic city has otherwise resisted. The local nickname is the Dutch La Défense, an open homage to the Paris business district that inspired the master plan. Whether you find it striking or out of place, it is unmistakably modern Amsterdam at work.

The cleanest way into Zuid by air is to skip Centraal entirely. A train from Schiphol reaches Amsterdam Zuid in seven minutes for half the fare of the Centraal route. From Zuid station, the new metro line 52 will take you north under the city in a few minutes; or tram 5 will deliver you to the Rijksmuseum and Concertgebouw stops in roughly fifteen. The Concertgebouw, incidentally — Amsterdam's grand 1888 concert hall, fronting the Museumplein — is acoustically among the finest in the world; the cheap lunchtime concerts on Wednesdays are one of the city's best-kept secrets. Save energy for Vondelpark afterward; on a sunny weekend the lawns fill with picnickers and impromptu music, and the park's open-air theatre runs free concerts all summer.