Vondelpark
In 1864 a group of wealthy Amsterdammers got together and bought a stretch of marsh and grass on the western rim of the city. Their goal was a place to ride and to stroll, and they were rich enough and impatient enough to make it themselves rather than wait for the municipality. They hired the landscape architect Jan David Zocher, who shaped the land in the English style, soft curves, mature trees framing oblique views, a river of grass running between groves. They opened the first version in 1865, named it Nieuwe Park, charged non-members an entrance fee, and never quite imagined that 160 years later their private retreat would be receiving roughly 10 million visitors a year, that the homeless and the joggers and the buskers and the tour groups and the rose-ringed parakeets would all be sharing the same forty-seven hectares.
The Park the Citizens Built
Christiaan Pieter van Eeghen led the founding association, the Vereeniging tot Aanleg van een Rij- en Wandelpark, which translates with effortful Dutch precision as the association for the laying out of a riding and walking park. The members put up the money for the land. Zocher designed in the picturesque English style that had become fashionable across nineteenth-century Europe, all gentle hills and informal water and clusters of native trees. In 1867 a bronze statue of the 17th-century playwright Joost van den Vondel arrived, set on a plinth designed by Pierre Cuypers, the architect who would later design Centraal Station and the Rijksmuseum. The statue stayed. The name eventually drifted from Nieuwe Park to Vondelpark, in tribute to the man on the pedestal.
Heineken's Beer Garden That Wasn't
In 1873 the brewer Gerard Adriaan Heineken asked permission to open a bar inside the new park and was turned down flat. Beer in the riding park was apparently a bridge too far for the founding association. Heineken did what successful entrepreneurs do: he opened it just outside the boundary instead, in a building on what is now Vondelstraat 41, calling it the Bierhuis Vondel. The same year a bandstand went up inside the park, in a more genteel concession to public amusement. By the middle of the twentieth century the association could no longer afford to maintain the place, and in 1953 they handed Vondelpark over to the city of Amsterdam. The landscape architect Egbert Mos reworked it in the 1950s for the larger crowds: smaller bushes clustered into bigger ones, redundant paths pulled out, the rose garden rebuilt.
The Theatre, the Theehuis, the Parakeets
The Openluchttheater, the open-air theatre near the western end of the park, runs free shows every summer from June through August: classical, world music, dance, cabaret, theatre, the occasional pop act. Donations of a single euro are quietly requested at the gate. 't Blauwe Theehuis, a small round 1937 modernist building, serves drinks in the middle of the lawns; Groot Melkhuis pours coffee where the milk shop used to stand. Sometime in the 1970s a few rose-ringed parakeets escaped from an aviary or a cargo hold, depending on which version of the story you trust, and they liked Amsterdam enough to stay. The flock now numbers in the thousands, bright green against the bare trees in winter, screaming at dawn. They are the most exotic permanent residents the park has ever had, and they are entirely uninvited.
Rules and Rhythms
On King's Day, 27 April, the park belongs to children, with a children's freemarket and games scattered across the lawns. On All Souls' Day each November, since 2011, people gather at dusk to float small candlelit boats across the big pond in memory of the dead of the past year. Every Friday evening, the Fridaynightskate sets out from in front of the Filmmuseum, a rolling pack of inline skaters that loops through the city and back. From 2008 the city allowed adult sexual activity in the park at night, with the formal request, in the words of Alderman Paul Van Grieken, that participants take their litter with them and stay away from the playground. The benches, redesigned in 2009 and installed from 2012, can be adopted by individuals or businesses, who pay for a plaque with whatever message they want. Read enough plaques and you have a folk-archive of the city's marriages, friendships, dogs, and grief.
From the Air
Vondelpark sits at 52.3569°N, 4.8664°E in Amsterdam-Zuid, an elongated park running roughly east-west just west of Leidseplein and Museumplein. Easily visible from the air as a green oblong cut into the southern canal grid. Best viewed at low altitude. Nearest airport is Amsterdam Schiphol (EHAM), about 10 km southwest.