Land van Hoboken

When Van Duffelen & Pelt raised their works on the corner in 1901¹, the building looked out over open grass. East of the 's-Gravendijkwal, on the ground that would carry the Rochussenstraat's low numbers, lay the 56-hectare country estate of the Van Hoboken family, bought on 20 August 1835 and bounded on the west by the avenue itself². That is why the corner faced a meadow and not a street.

The estate

The estate cut a green rectangle into the western edge of the growing city³. The Nieuwe Binnenweg closed it to the north, the Westersingel to the east and the Westzeedijk to the south; on the west ran the 's-Gravendijkwal, so the avenue the corner faces was the estate's own boundary⁴. Its owner was Anthony van Hoboken, Rotterdam's largest private shipowner of the day⁵. His own history reaches well beyond this field and has a deep dive of its own, the owner himself. For the corner, only the land matters.

The estate on the city's own 1900 plan: a green rectangle west of the built town, with engraved labels for Middelland, Beukelsdijk and the watering that drained it (Gemeentewerken Rotterdam; public domain).

Most of the estate was meadow, but it had a seat: the family's country villa, in its own park⁶. In 1851–52 the shipowner's son Jacobus built the house later called Villa Dijkzigt, home of the Natuurhistorisch Museum since 1987⁷. The working estate had a farm too.

A perspective drawing of 1867, identified from its file label as the estate's Dijkzigt farm, shows a model farm within sight of the city.

The land nobody could buy

Rotterdam was growing and wanted this edge. The Van Hoboken heirs would not sell. For a generation the eastern half of the Rochussenstraat could not be built at all, because it was privately held meadow, unbuildable until the city could acquire it⁸. The corner stood on the built western frontage and looked straight across that reserved ground. A run of open-land views survives from those years, taken from the pasture toward the city or along its edges.

A panorama postcard of February 1904 looks across the open land from the Binnenweg side. The built city is a low line on the far edge of the grass.

On a postcard of about 1907, cattle and sheep graze in the foreground and the Diaconessenhuis hospital rises beyond the meadow. This is the same open Land van Hoboken that the corner faced in the building's first years⁹.

The same edge under snow, in a view its file label dates to about 1908 and places along the Nieuwe Binnenweg.

A card of about 1909 looks across a still-open, unmade foreground at the built terrace of the 's-Gravendijkwal itself. The avenue's houses stood finished; the estate ground in front of them was not yet developed.

About 1912: the view across the open estate toward the Westersingel skyline, with cattle grazing in the middle distance.

The estate seen from the Westzeedijk, its southern edge, on a picture postcard of about 1900 captioned Land Hoboken (public domain by age).

The 's-Gravendijkwal, the estate's western boundary and the corner's own avenue, on an early colour postcard of about 1905 to 1910 (public domain by age).

A lithograph of 1923 by Simon Moulijn, titled "Het Land van Hoboken", draws the estate as it survived into the 1920s.

A painting dated to about 1930–40, titled as a view from the west, shows haymaking on the polder meadow, with the city skyline on the horizon. Witteveen's building plan had already been published in 1927¹⁰.

Bought at last

In 1924 the municipality finally acquired the estate, for four million guilders¹¹. The figure of seven million that is sometimes given is not borne out by the record. With the land in public hands, the gap in the street could at last be filled.

Built out as Dijkzigt

The city built a new district there. The eastern Rochussenstraat and the quarter around it were laid out only in the 1930s, on W. G. Witteveen's "Uitbreidingsplan Dijkzigt" for the former Land van Hoboken, a plan published in 1927 over a base map dated 1926¹².

The plan laid coloured new blocks over the green core of the estate¹³. Over the following years the district gained the Unilever office in 1931, Museum Boijmans in 1935 and the Erasmiaans Gymnasium in 1937¹⁴. The Rochussenstraat's low numbers, east of the avenue and numbered below 169, belong to this later city, not to the one that built no. 169.

Open meadow on one side of the house and built street on the other, a generation apart: that is why no. 169 looked out on a field for so long. Why the first building on the street is already no. 169 is its own question.