The Hinderwet file we cannot read

The building permit shows the factory floor by floor, as a shell; the permit deep dive reads its sheets one by one. What a shell cannot tell us is whether a Hinderwet file for the plant survives. If one does, the permit for an installation like this could record the machines, the motor and the workshop plan, along with any objections from neighbours¹.

We are not wholly in the dark about that plant. In 1907 the trade press walked through the works from the basement up. Below was a machinale zagerij, a mechanical sawing floor stacked with raw mahogany, oak and cedar; above it a first-floor showroom; and on the second floor a cabinet shop where about twenty men worked at as many benches. A thirteen-horsepower gas engine drove all of it, almost silently, and had run for seven years without a stoppage²:

The 1907 photographs of the workshops and benches show the working floors that a Hinderwet file may have inventoried³. Whether the works ran by power in 1907 is therefore settled. What remains open is whether a legal file survives, and what it might add to the press: the permit application itself, a formal inventory of machines, a plan and any objection from a neighbour.

The works made no secret of being a factory. In 1905, and in no other year of the census run, the city directory entered it as a stoommeubelfabriek, a steam furniture factory, a label that suggests a steam plant, though as a directory description it does not prove one⁴:

The same year the firm placed its own recruitment advertisement, asking for a hand versed in machine woodworking:

By January 1909 the firm's newspaper advertisement gave the address as Fabriek: Rochussenstraat No. 169⁵, and as late as the early 1920s the directories still listed it as a manufacturer rather than a shop⁶:

The easy route to that file leads nowhere. A systematic Delpher sweep, recorded on 20 August 2026, found no Hinderwet notice for Rochussenstraat 169 in the digitised newspapers, although they printed such notices for other addresses on the same street through the 1900s and after⁷. That means only that the press search found no notice; it does not prove that no permit existed.

The series that may hold such a file has been found, but it was never digitised⁸. It sits at the city archive in two blocks, with a gap between them⁹. The archive's own shelf list names the earlier holding exactly:

The earlier block is the building police's Hinderwet series, toegang 766 at the city archive¹⁰. It runs in bound year-volumes from the 1860s to 18 January 1918 and covers the years in which the works opened¹¹. The later block is a separate holding that begins only in 1940, and even then it keeps only copies for demolished premises until its running registers start in 1955¹². The earlier block therefore covers the Van Duffelen & Pelt years, 1901 to 1917, and still needs to be searched¹³; the firm's advertisements for workshop hands run from 1902 to 1918, much the same span¹⁴. The gap of roughly 1918 to 1955 between the two blocks covers the Beens factory years of the 1920s and the whole later J. A. van Duyn era at no. 169¹⁵. No online index by name or address exists. Even so, the earlier block need not be searched blind: each of its pre-1911 volumes has its own table of contents, so a reader can work through it methodically instead of page by page.

A visit would settle it. The volumes exist, and a reader in the room would find out whether one of them holds an entry for no. 169, and what that entry says¹⁶. The order of requests is already planned: first the two volumes for 1901, the year the works opened, then the years on either side¹⁷. Until someone goes, the legal and technical record that a Hinderwet file may contain stays unread. Meanwhile the 1907 report already describes much of the plant such a permit might cover¹⁸.