The genius of the Stadsherberg was its location. Wedged between the colonial customs houses at Sunda Kelapa, it was literally the first building visitors saw upon entering Batavia and the last they passed on the way out. Van Hogezand's building permit came with an additional license: permission to operate a carriage hire business from the inn, running delmans and sados into the city proper. So the inn was not merely a place to sleep - it was the gateway, the point of transition between sea and city. From 1850, van Hogezand earned an extra 200 guilders a month by leasing a small room on the north side to an Englishman named J. Parker, who ran a ship supplies business called the Marine Stores. The Stadsherberg had become a one-stop operation: arrive by ship, clear customs, hire a carriage, buy your supplies, and spend the night.

The inn proved so profitable that van Hogezand did what successful entrepreneurs do: he sold at the peak. In 1852, he transferred the Stadsherberg to J.F. Tentee and used the proceeds to purchase the Hotel der Nederlanden, one of Batavia's grander establishments. That same year, on June 1, the Groote Boom - the "Large Custom Post" - also relocated to the eastern bank of the canal. Traffic past the inn's front door doubled. The timing was exquisite, though Tentee rather than van Hogezand reaped the benefit. Then came the forces that would supercharge the harbor for decades: steamships replaced sailing vessels, the Suez Canal opened in 1869, and the Dutch liberalized private enterprise in the Indies after 1870. More passengers than ever flowed through the Kleine Boom. The Stadsherberg's importance to daily life in Batavia became so obvious that in 1863, the colonial government placed the city's first letterbox very close to the inn - a small detail that says everything about centrality.

Prosperity at Sunda Kelapa depended on one fact: it was the only way in and out of Batavia. When that ceased to be true, everything changed. In 1885, the colonial government completed a modern deep-water port at Tanjung Priok, nine kilometers to the east. The new facility could handle the larger steamships that the narrow, shallow Sunda Kelapa canal never could. Passenger traffic through the old harbor dropped precipitously. The Stadsherberg, which had thrived precisely because of its chokepoint position, found itself guarding a door that fewer and fewer people walked through. By 1914, the building had been acquired by Ong Tek Hin, who converted it into a storehouse - a pragmatic acknowledgment that the age of travelers passing through had ended. The building was still standing in 1949, four years after Indonesian independence, but at some point afterward it was demolished. No record survives of the exact date.

The Stadsherberg existed for roughly a century, and in that span it traced the full arc of colonial Batavia's fortunes. It rose with the harbor, profited from the global forces - the Suez Canal, steam power, trade liberalization - that drew the world closer together, and fell when infrastructure simply moved elsewhere. Van Hogezand's original insight was timeless: position yourself where people have to pass, and they will stop. But infrastructure is not timeless. Ports shift, canals are superseded, and the chokepoints of one era become the backwaters of the next. Today, the old Sunda Kelapa harbor still operates, accommodating pinisi sailing ships that carry freight between the Indonesian islands. The waterfront where the Stadsherberg once stood is dense with warehouses and the activity of a working port, though a far quieter one than the gateway that once funneled all of Batavia's traffic past a single inn's front door.