The Jordaan is Amsterdam's most-photographed residential neighbourhood and the slowest-mobility example of urban gentrification in European history. The neighbourhood was built 1612-1614 as the cheap-housing zone of the Dutch Golden Age - workers and refugees on the wrong side of Prinsengracht. For 350 years it stayed working-class, poor, densely packed, culturally fertile. From the 1970s onwards it gentrified steadily into one of the most-desirable urban districts in Europe. Walking it now is partly architectural appreciation (the canals, the gables, the canal-front 17th-century houses) and partly the realisation that the working-class character is mostly visible in the place names, the brown cafés, and the folk-song tradition - the population that built and lived in the Jordaan has been almost entirely replaced.
The 1612-1614 Fourth Expansion
The Jordaan was created as part of Amsterdam's Fourth Expansion (1610-1615), the urban-planning programme that more than doubled the city's area to accommodate the Dutch Golden Age population boom. The expansion added the famous Canal Ring (Grachtengordel) for the wealthy bourgeois merchants - Herengracht, Keizersgracht, Prinsengracht - with their large canal-house plots. Immediately west of Prinsengracht, on the outside of the new wealthy zone, the city created the Jordaan for everyone else: working-class artisans, refugees, French Huguenots fleeing the religious wars, sailors, dockworkers, dyers, weavers, brewery workers. The street pattern was rigid - four canals parallel to each other (Brouwersgracht, Lindengracht, Egelantiersgracht, Bloemgracht), all named for trees and flowers, with cross-streets and small "dwarsstraten" between. The plots were narrow, the buildings shorter, the canal frontage simpler than the bourgeois Canal Ring on the other side of Prinsengracht. The name "Jordaan" probably comes from the French "jardin" (garden), echoing the flower-and-tree street names and the refugee French population.
The 1620-1631 Westerkerk was the centrepiece of the expanded city - the Protestant church designed by Hendrick de Keyser, with the tallest tower in Amsterdam (87 metres). The tower carries the imperial Habsburg crown of Maximilian I as its weathervane (granted to Amsterdam in 1489 in gratitude for financial support to the Holy Roman Emperor). The Noorderkerk (1620-1623, also by de Keyser) was the smaller working-class church for the northern Jordaan. Both churches are Protestant - the Dutch Republic was officially Calvinist - and architecturally plain (white walls, no decoration, focus on the pulpit) but structurally innovative for their period.
Three centuries of poverty
Through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries the Jordaan was Amsterdam's working-class slum. The population was about 80,000 by 1900 - the densest urban district in Europe at the time, with the highest mortality rate in the Netherlands. The textile mills, the brewing industry (the Jordaan was the location of many Amsterdam breweries until the 19th century - the Brouwersgracht canal is named for the brewers), the dyeing industries, the sailmakers, the cooper workshops all employed the Jordaan population. The dwellings were small (often 4-6 people in a single 30 sq m apartment), the sanitation was poor, the air was bad (the canals worked partly as open sewers until the 19th-century cleanup).
The culture was rich. The Jordaan was the birthplace of the Amsterdam "levenslied" (folk song) tradition - sentimental working-class songs about love, loss, the neighbourhood, the local heroes. The 19th-century "singing cafés" had in-house piano players and customers who joined in; the songs were memorised, passed down, and developed into a recognised genre by the late 1800s. The tradition produced Johnny Jordaan (1911-1989), the singer who defined the genre after WWII with songs like "Bij ons in de Jordaan" (At our place in the Jordaan). Tante Leen, Manke Nelis, Willy Alberti - all Jordaan-born folk singers became national stars in the 1950s-70s. The tradition still survives in a handful of singing cafés in the Jordaan (Café Nol on Westerstraat is the most famous).
The neighbourhood was also Amsterdam's centre of anarchist-socialist working-class politics. The 1934 Jordaan riots ("Jordaanoproer") were the largest pre-war urban uprising in the Netherlands - thousands of Jordaan residents fought police for several days after the government cut unemployment benefits during the Depression; multiple deaths. The riots are commemorated by a small monument on Haarlemmerplein.
The Anne Frank period
Otto Frank moved his family from Frankfurt to Amsterdam in 1933, fleeing Nazi Germany. They settled in the south Amsterdam neighbourhood Rivierenbuurt. Otto established the Opekta and Pectacon companies trading in pectin (used for jam-making) and spices, with the business address at Prinsengracht 263 in the Jordaan. When the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands intensified after May 1940, Otto Frank prepared a hiding place in the attic and second-floor annex of the Prinsengracht 263 building - the "Secret Annex" (Achterhuis), accessed via a hidden door behind a movable bookcase.
From 6 July 1942 to 4 August 1944, eight people lived in the Annex: Otto, Edith, Margot and Anne Frank, plus Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer. They were sustained by four non-Jewish helpers from Otto Frank's business - Miep Gies, Jan Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler - who brought food, news, and books. Anne Frank, aged 13-15 during the period, kept a diary that documented the daily life, the relationships, the political news from outside.
On 4 August 1944 the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, German security service) raided the Annex on a tip from an informant (the informant's identity has never been conclusively established - investigations have continued through 2026). All eight occupants were arrested and deported. Anne and Margot Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February-March 1945, weeks before liberation. Of the eight people in the Annex, only Otto Frank survived. Anne's diary was preserved by Miep Gies after the arrest and returned to Otto after the war; he had it published in 1947. The diary has been translated into 70+ languages and is one of the most-read books in history. The house has been a museum since 1960; €16 ticket, online-only booking 6 weeks ahead.
The 1970s squatter movement
By the 1960s the Jordaan was severely deteriorated - the housing stock had been minimally maintained for decades, many buildings were structurally unsafe, the population was elderly working-class, the post-war modernisation programmes had favoured demolition. The city's 1969 master plan called for demolishing large sections of the Jordaan and replacing them with modern apartment blocks; in 1971 the city demolished a small block of historic houses on the Prinsengracht to make way for new construction.
The demolition triggered the Amsterdam squatter movement ("krakers") - mostly young Catalan-aesthetic students and bohemians who occupied empty Jordaan buildings to prevent demolition. The movement grew through the 1970s into a major political force - by 1980 about 10,000 squatters lived in central Amsterdam, many in the Jordaan. The 1980 "kroningsoproer" (coronation riot) on Beatrix's coronation day was the high point: city-wide street fighting between police and squatters over a demolition order. The riots forced a city policy U-turn - the master plan was abandoned, the demolitions stopped, the Jordaan was protected as a heritage district.
The squatter movement won the architectural battle but lost the social one. Through the 1980s-90s the Jordaan housing stock was restored, then sold to private buyers. The original working-class residents (who had been protected from demolition) were progressively bought out, displaced by retirement, or driven out by rising rents. The new population was young-professional and middle-class. By 2010 the Jordaan was a fully gentrified neighbourhood - the prettiest residential district in Amsterdam, with the highest property prices, and almost no remaining working-class population. The brown cafés, the singing cafés, the folk-song tradition, the place names, the canal-front gables remain. The working-class community that produced all of those has mostly gone.
The contemporary Jordaan
The Jordaan of 2026 has an official population of about 18,000 in 0.45 sq km (one of the most densely-populated districts in central Amsterdam by some measures, but with mostly middle-class single-occupant or couple housing rather than the historical multi-family-per-apartment density). The architectural character is intact - the 17th-century street plan, the canal-front canal houses, the four canals, the brown cafés - because the 1970s squatter movement saved the neighbourhood from demolition.
Walk the Jordaan north-to-south following the four canals (Brouwersgracht → Lindengracht → Egelantiersgracht → Bloemgracht → Prinsengracht) and you cover the full 900-metre length in 45 minutes. Branch into a hofje when you spot an unmarked door; pause at a brown café for a witbier; cross to the Negen Straatjes for shopping; loop back via the Westerkerk and Anne Frank House (book ahead). The neighbourhood is small, flat, dense, photogenic, and after 400 years still distinct from the bourgeois Canal Ring on the other side of Prinsengracht.
