Living in Oostelijk Havengebied, Amsterdam

The Oostelijk Havengebied is the strangest-shaped piece of residential Amsterdam. It is not a neighbourhood that grew: it is a harbour that stopped working and was rebuilt as housing, on land that was made for ships. Two islands, Java and KNSM, and three peninsulas, Borneo, Sporenburg and Cruquius, stick out into open water east of Centraal. That shape is the whole story here, because it decides how you get in and out, how much sky you see and how far the nearest anything is.

What it is

The docks were built from 1883 onwards, starting with the Oostelijke Handelskade, and the last shipping company, the KNSM, left in 1979. Squatters and artists moved in around 1980 and stopped the demolition; by the middle of that decade the city had zoned it for housing, and through the 1990s it was rebuilt almost from scratch. What went up is one of the best-known pieces of modern Dutch urbanism: tall blocks on the two islands, dense low-rise on the peninsulas, canal-house proportions rebuilt in contemporary materials, and a set of bridges that people come to photograph. Somewhere around twenty thousand people now live here in close to ten thousand homes, a large share of them owner-occupied, and household incomes run above the city average. Administratively it belongs to stadsdeel Oost, and it is divided into a long list of small sub-areas: Java-eiland, KNSM-eiland, Borneo, Sporenburg, Cruquius, Rietlanden and the Architectenbuurt among them.

Who lives here

Families and settled professionals, more than students. The housing was built for buyers and for mid-market renting rather than for sharing, so flats tend to be whole homes with two or three bedrooms, and the room market is thinner than in the nineteenth-century buurten to the west. What does come up tends to be a room in a family-sized flat, often with light and a view that no old-city address can match. The population is international without being transient: people who came for a job, stayed, and bought.

What it's like during the day

Bright and calm, and unusually quiet for somewhere ten minutes from the centre. There is water on both sides of almost every street, which changes the light and the noise, and the pavements are wide. It is a place of school runs, dogs, joggers on the quays and people working from home. The trade-off is that daytime life is residential rather than commercial: there is no dense shopping street anywhere in the area, what commerce there is sits near the western entrance, and on a weekday afternoon the peninsulas can feel empty.

What it's like in the evening

Very quiet. This is not a going-out district and was never planned as one. A handful of restaurants and bars sit along the Oostelijke Handelskade and on the islands, and beyond that the evening happens elsewhere: the Indische Buurt and the Zeeburgerdijk to the south, the Czaar Peterstraat and Nieuwmarkt to the west. If you like walking home along the water at midnight this is close to ideal; if you want to fall out of a bar and be home in five minutes, it is not.

Getting around

Count the bridges before you sign anything, because they set your daily geometry. Java-eiland connects to the mainland by the Jan Schaeferbrug, and to KNSM by the Verbindingsdam. Borneo and Sporenburg are joined to each other by three much-photographed bridges, the Pythonbrug among them, and reach the mainland at their western ends by the roads through Rietlandpark and along the C. van Eesterenlaan; the Piet Heintunnel, open since 1997, takes the through traffic underneath. For public transport, tram 1 has its eastern terminus at Azartplein on the KNSM and Java islands, tram 26 runs from Centraal along the Piet Heinkade with a stop at Rietlandpark and carries on to IJburg, and buses 43 and 65 serve the peninsulas, running to Centraal and to Amstelstation. By bike, Rietlandpark is twelve to fifteen minutes from Centraal, KNSM-eiland fourteen to eighteen, and the far end of Borneo more like twenty. Muiderpoort station is eight to ten minutes from the peninsulas. The rule of thumb is simple: the further out along a finger of land you live, the more every trip costs you, and there is no shortcut, because the water does not allow one.

Eating and shopping

Thin, and concentrated in one place. Nearly all the supermarkets sit together on the Oostelijke Handelskade at the western entrance, with a Turkish supermarket on the C. van Eesterenlaan as the only real alternative, so groceries mean a walk or a short ride back towards Rietlandpark whichever island you live on: about five minutes on foot from KNSM-eiland, closer to ten from the far end of Borneo. For a market and for real choice you cross to the Dappermarkt or the Javastraat in the Indische Buurt, both under ten minutes by bike from the peninsulas. Restaurants exist but are spread out; nobody here has twenty places within two hundred metres, which is the ordinary Amsterdam standard further west.

When NOT to pick it

If you are arriving alone and want to be in the middle of things, this is the wrong shape of neighbourhood: the walk to a bar, a market or a late supermarket is long, the room supply is small because the housing was built for households, and living at the end of a peninsula adds ten minutes to every single trip. Winter wind off the open water is a real thing here. It is the wrong choice if you want street life, cheap rent or a big pool of shared flats, and the Indische Buurt or the Dapperbuurt would serve you better on all three. It is the right choice if you want light, water, quiet and modern flats with proper insulation, a tram or bus at the end of the street and the centre fifteen minutes away by bike, and if you would rather look at the IJ than at the building opposite.