De Pijp

Neighborhood · De PijpAmsterdam,Netherlands

Dense 1870s tenements south of Amsterdam's canal ring, built cheap and now the inner city's most mixed quarter, with a daily market through its middle.

De Pijp is where the inner city eats. Within one block you can find a Surinamese roti counter, a Turkish bakery, a Syrian grill and a natural wine bar, and terraces come out the moment the sun does and stay out until it is genuinely cold. The Albert Cuyp market runs east to west across the middle of it, the Sarphatipark provides the green, and the old Heineken brewery anchors the northern edge. The streets around them are narrow and the brick tenements tall, thrown up in the 1870s and 80s for workers pouring into a growing city, and built for speed and profit rather than for living in. That cheapness is why the district turned out as it did: low rents kept it available to students, artists and successive waves of immigrants, and it is now the most mixed quarter of the inner city. Late afternoon is the hinge. The market packs up, the bars fill, and the neighbourhood switches from shopping to sitting without any obvious signal.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Order across the street, not down the menu — the point here is that four kitchens from four countries are within fifty metres, so a meal is easier assembled than ordered.
The park is named after a doctor — Samuel Sarphati, a Sephardic Jewish physician, organised Amsterdam's first waste collection and a factory for cheap decent bread; the park took his name in 1885.
The streets are long and narrow for a reason — the district was built to a speculative grid for maximum housing, which is where the name 'the pipe' probably comes from.

Things to do

1
Assemble dinner from three counters
Get a roti from a Surinamese kitchen, something grilled from a Turkish counter down the block, and a beer from a terrace, and eat them in whatever order they arrive. The district is set up for exactly this and nobody will find it strange.
2
Sit in the Sarphatipark on a weekday
It is small enough to cross in five minutes and busy without being crowded — dogs, prams, people reading, a pond with a heron. It is the quiet middle of the loudest neighbourhood in Amsterdam and it is used almost entirely by people who live here.