The Indische Buurt - Indies Quarter - sits in Amsterdam-Oost, fenced in by water and rail. The North Sea Canal had opened in 1876, and the boom that followed needed somewhere to put its workers. So the city rolled brick blocks east of the tracks and gave the new streets names borrowed from the archipelago Dutch ships had been hauling cloves and rubber and human labor out of for three centuries. The naming was confident, almost casual. The first street went up in 1902. By the time the last colonial-era signs were hammered into place, an empire was already pulling itself apart on the other side of the world. The streets stayed. The empire did not.

For decades the Indische Buurt was Amsterdam's afterthought - cut off from the city center by the Amsterdam-Utrecht railway, served by tram 14 from May 1915 but otherwise left to its own devices. Muiderpoort Station, the bridge that would finally pull the neighborhood into the city's transit network, did not open until 1939. Growth paused in the 1930s when the Great Depression reached the canals, then resumed. In 1942 a public bathhouse opened on Javaplein - one of the last built in Amsterdam, a sign of how late running water arrived in some of these flats. The bathhouse stayed open until 1982, a forty-year run during which it slowly became less necessity than memory.

When the Dutch East Indies became Indonesia in 1949, hundreds of thousands of people - Indo-Dutch families, Moluccans, mixed-heritage colonial subjects suddenly on the wrong side of independence - made the long passage to a country many had never seen. Some of them found themselves living on streets named after the islands they had just left. The neighborhood absorbed wave after wave after that: Turkish and Moroccan guest workers in the 1960s and 70s, Surinamese families after 1975, then a slow accretion of newer arrivals from everywhere else. The Amsterdam city government estimates roughly a hundred languages are spoken in the Indische Buurt now. Roughly half of Zeeburg residents have an immigrant background; in the Indische Buurt the share runs higher still.

On the neighborhood's eastern edge, Flevopark holds something most visitors walk past without noticing. The naturalist Jac. P. Thijsse imagined the park in 1908, but construction did not begin until 1928 - the slow Dutch dance of expropriation and budgets. Tucked inside the green is a Jewish cemetery that has been in use since 1714. An estimated 200,000 people are buried there. After 1942, when Nazi occupation began emptying Amsterdam of its Jewish residents, active burials stopped. The stones stayed. The park grew around them. It is possible to swim laps at the 60-meter Flevoparkbad pool a few hundred meters away and never know what lies under the hedges across the path.

Since the mid-1990s the Indische Buurt has been gentrifying at the pace of a Dutch coffee shop opening. Squatted buildings have been renovated and sold. Timorplein's 2010 makeover brought Studio K theater, a Stayokay hostel, and meeting rooms for the International Institute for Research and Education. Javastraat - the shopping spine that runs through Timorbuurt - has become a strip of boutiques, Turkish bakeries, natural-wine bars, and Indo-Surinamese takeaways that share blocks with the older grocers. To the east, the Sluisbuurt development is supposed to deliver 5,500 new homes and a clutch of high-rise towers by 2030. The Indische Buurt's residents, many of them descendants of the people the original street names refer to, watch the cranes go up and wonder what the next set of arrivals will be called.