Why 169?

The corner begins with a question. Van Duffelen & Pelt's works was permitted in 1899, operating by 1900 and finished in 1901^1 2. It was the first building ever raised on the Rochussenstraat³, and yet it opened its doors as number 169. A first house is usually number 1. The answer comes from several records rather than a single document. Four things in the record point to an answer, and one thing that would settle it is still missing.

What the record fixes

First, the system. From 1872 Rotterdam numbered its houses by street, one running sequence per street, in place of the district wijk-numbers it had used since 1846⁴. Once the street was named in 1900⁵, a Rochussenstraat number marked a position in a single line, not a count of buildings put up.

For a short while the corner had another address. In 1900–01 it also appeared as Coolhavenkade 169: the population register marks it as the address that became Rochussenstraat 169, and the firm's own 1900 advertisements place the factory at Coolhavenkade, at the corner of the 's-Gravendijkwal^6 7. The official street-name register has Rochussenstraat, fixed by Rotterdam’s board of mayor and aldermen (B&W) on 7 March 1900, and no entry for Coolhavenkade. The safest reading is a working or provisional name used while the street was being built, not a separately proven formal street name. It pointed to the planned Coolhaven, where the first spade went in only on 27 February 1923⁸.

Second, the line. The Rochussenstraat was most probably conceived as one continuous street of about 1.9 kilometres, from the Eendrachtsplein near the city centre out to the Aelbrechtskade in Delfshaven, with low numbers at the centre end and numbers climbing westward⁹. The street's start and end points and its later house-number anchors support that reading without clinching it. If it holds, number 169 measured how far along the projected line the corner plot fell.

The municipal-works plan of about 1900 catches the moment. It labels the Rochussenstraat among the first-built streets of the new Middelland grid, while to the south, toward Het Park, the Land van Hoboken is still open fields cut by drainage ditches¹⁰. The corner was new street frontage on the edge of the freshly gridded Middelland, facing the still-open estate to the east¹¹.

Third, the plot. The corner at the 's-Gravendijkwal was probably the first plot at the western edge of the estate that could actually be built, and its high number most likely records its fixed place on the whole projected line counted from the Eendrachtsplein, not the order in which it went up¹². On that reading the building came first in time but stood a long way down the street.

Fourth, the empty low numbers. The land east of the 's-Gravendijkwal, which would carry the street's lowest numbers, was the 56-hectare Van Hoboken estate¹³. This was privately held meadow that the heirs would not sell, so the city could not acquire it until 1924, for four million guilders, and it was built out only in the 1930s as the Dijkzigt district^14 15. By the numbering argument, those deep low numbers, roughly the stretch below 118, were held back for a piece of street that did not yet exist. The estate that kept them empty is a story of its own. The street did not literally begin at 169. The numbers just east of the crossing were already in use: by 1905 the address book ran the Rochussenstraat from 119 upward. Number 169 was remarkable for a narrower reason: it was probably the first plot at the estate's western edge that could actually be built, and it carried a number far down the line.

Here is the reserved ground itself: the open Land van Hoboken about 1904, the meadow that kept the low numbers empty for a generation (Dr. Trenkler Co., c. 1904; public domain).

And here is the plan that finally filled them: W. G. Witteveen's 1927 Uitbreidingsplan 'Dijkzigt', which laid the low-numbered eastern half over the former estate (Gemeente Rotterdam, 1926/27).

The address book confirms the number. In the 1905 volume the corner appears as three separate lines at a flat 169, one for the firm and one for each of its two partners; the lettered units settled only in later editions. The same page heads its run "Rochussenstraat Nos. 119—171", so the corner already stood well down an occupied line.

What is not proven

One piece is still missing. No council decision of 1900–1901 reserving numbers 1 to 168 for the projected eastern half has been consulted, so the argument above probably holds but is not proven¹⁶. It rests on several things agreeing: the numbering system, the shape of the street and the clearly later building of the eastern half. The one ordinance that fixed the numbers has not been seen.

We know which record might settle it. The Rotterdam Gemeenteverslag for 1900–01 is not digitised and can be read only on site at the city archive. A visit to the reading room would test whether it records a formal reservation of the low numbers, or shows the number instead emerging from the plan's division into plots. Until then, "why 169?" has a strong and probable answer, not a proven one.