Amsterdam started talking about a new opera house in 1915. It also needed a new city hall. For decades, the two projects orbited each other without ever quite landing. Sites were proposed and rejected. A 1955 commission produced a design that the city council rejected in 1964. A 1967 competition produced another design, by the Viennese architect Wilhelm Holzbauer, that the budget then promptly rejected. By 1979, someone finally suggested the obvious cost-saving move: combine them. One building, one site, two functions. Holzbauer was paired with the Dutch architect Cees Dam, and in 1980 the city council approved the joint design. The provincial and national governments approved it in 1981. After sixty-six years of debate, Amsterdam had a plan.

The plot of land had a name: Vlooienburg, reclaimed from the Amstel in the early seventeenth century when Amsterdam expanded eastward. For three hundred years it sat at the heart of the Jodenbuurt, the Jewish quarter, a dense warren of houses, synagogues, market stalls, and diamond workshops. Then came the German occupation. Between 1942 and 1944, the Nazis deported roughly 60,000 Amsterdam Jews to the death camps; fewer than 5,000 of those deported survived. After the war, the emptied buildings were stripped for firewood by freezing Amsterdammers during the Hongerwinter of 1944-45. By the late 1940s, the heart of the old Jewish quarter was bare ground. That was the "expansive area" the city council eyed for its new civic complex. Build anything on that earth and you are building in a graveyard. The Stopera was built on it.

Construction began in 1982 and the city came to a boil. Squatters had occupied surrounding buildings throughout the 1970s, and the broader counterculture - what was left of the Provo movement, the kraakbeweging, the leftwing arts scene - saw the project as everything wrong with Amsterdam's modernization: top-down, expensive, indifferent to the neighborhood's memory. Demonstrations turned into riots. Police charged crowds at Waterlooplein. The cost overrun reached 112 million guilders above the original budget. The opera house opened on September 23, 1986; the city hall two years later. The Dutch National Opera, the Dutch National Ballet, and Holland Symfonia all moved in. The theatre management quietly refused to use the word Stopera in any official communication. Amsterdammers used it anyway, and use it still.

Step outside the curved facade on the Amstel side and you find the Joods Verzetsmonument, dedicated in 1988 to the Jews of Amsterdam who resisted the occupation. It is a low, dark monument by the sculptor Joseph Glatt - a broken pillar, a Hebrew inscription, a place to put flowers. Every November 9, the city gathers here to mark Kristallnacht. The monument sits in the shadow of the building that displaced the neighborhood it commemorates, and the proximity is deliberate. The opera house and the memorial share a square. Inside, audiences watch Verdi and Stravinsky from the multi-level foyers, looking out through tall windows at the Amstel. Outside, the stones name what was here before. Both things are true at once, and Amsterdam has decided to live with the contradiction rather than pretend it away.