Pintohuis

A mansion on a street, not a canal

Pintohuis stands on the Sint Antoniesbreestraat, a couple of minutes on foot from Nieuwmarkt square. In Amsterdam, grand merchant houses usually face a canal. This one faces a street, and that is the first thing that makes it unusual.

Today the ground floor is open to everyone as a reading room and café, and you can simply walk in. The upper floors are offices of the Waag, so the public part is downstairs. It is a good place to sit with a coffee and a book, in a room that has had a long and rough life.

Merchants, a riot and a motorway

The house dates from around 1605 to 1607. It was built for Jan Jansz. Carel, one of the first directors of the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602. He bought six plots to make room for it. The Company itself ran its business from the Oost-Indisch Huis, a few minutes away.

In 1651 the house was bought by Isaack de Pinto, a banker and merchant from Antwerp. The De Pintos were a rich Portuguese-Jewish family of merchants and bankers. In 1686 his son David bought the house next door and had everything rebuilt. The design is probably by Elias Bouman, who also designed the Portuguese Synagogue. The old double stepped gable gave way to a sandstone front in Dutch Classical style, and people talked about it.

Not everyone admired it. In 1696, during the Aansprekersoproer, a riot, the richly decorated house was plundered and twenty-seven people were arrested. The attic once held an oak sukkah, the booth used at the Jewish festival of Sukkot. The family sold the house in 1756, to an apothecary.

The street lay in the old Jewish quarter. After the war most residents never came back, and the empty houses decayed. By the late 1960s the buildings around Pintohuis had been torn down, and it stood alone on a bare field. The city bought it in 1968 to demolish it, because a four-lane road and a metro line were planned through the area.

Neighbours, squatters and a preservation foundation fought to keep it. On 5 January 1972 the city council voted by a single vote not to build the road. In March and April 1975 the Nieuwmarkt riots broke out over the demolition of homes for the metro tunnel. The metro was built, but the motorway was not, and new homes went up along the old street lines between 1975 and 1984. The restored house served as a library branch from late 1975 until 2012. The reading room opened in 2014.

What to look for

Stand across the street first and look at the sandstone front. It is wider and more ornate than anything around it, and the newer housing on either side makes it stand out even more.

Inside, look up. The painted ceilings on the ground floor are not original. They were added during the restoration of 1975. They are still a good reason to come in, and a reminder that the building was rescued rather than kept untouched.

Then walk down the alley beside the house and look at the back. You can see the wide main building on the right and the narrow side house on the left.