Who was recorded at Rochussenstraat 169

The corner was never only a factory. People lived at Rochussenstraat 169, above the workshop and after it. The firm came first: it was operating at the corner by the summer of 1900, and by that autumn a partner was living above the new factory¹. Later came a bookkeeper, a firm's director with his own household and, in the end, a widow who died there: Petronella van Vessem, widow of Jan Dino Adriaan Leeflang². Eventually the surviving record reaches a music venue. This register gathers what has been recovered of both threads, the commercial occupants and the residents of the building and its lettered units, 169a through 169d, with the years each was recorded and a source for every row. Its backbone is the Rotterdam address book. Where the directory falls silent, telephone directories, household cards of the population register, and separate street and name lists fill the gap.

How to read it

The unit letter is the thing most likely to mislead. In several editions the address book prints a range of units against the firm (169a, or 169a–c, or 169a–b), and the range changes from edition to edition while the people behind it do not move at all³. On the pages, the printed range shifts and the named residents stay put.

Why the printed record drifts like this, and how to read it honestly, is taken up in a method note. The family and business ties between the names in these rows, who founded, married or succeeded whom, have their own place in the relationships register.

At first there was no lettered split. It settled into place between 1906 and 1911, as the household above the works divided into the two founders, with the firm between them^4 5. Before that the corner was a single address; afterwards it was a small vertical street of its own. Gerrit van Duffelen, the painter son of one founder, is recorded living above the works throughout this settled arrangement, at 169b without a break from 1913 to 1923⁶. He was a household member whom the address book kept naming long after the a/b/c split was fixed⁷.

What the table holds and dates

A bookkeeper, J. J. van der Welle, is recorded as a resident from 1923⁸. H. P. Beens, a firm's director, lived in the building himself and moved between its units before he left for London⁹. Some years in the later 1920s and mid-1930s would not come out of the printed street list, and they were recovered through the address book's separate name list¹⁰.

In five years, 1932, 1933, 1936, 1937 and 1938, the address book is silent because no Rotterdam edition was printed¹¹. The combined 1934–35 edition between them was printed and is read elsewhere in this register, so the silence is not one continuous run. Nor is the gap an OCR failure: the source itself is missing. The interlocal telephone directory fills part of it. Furnishco, trading name of the N.V. Continental Carpet and Furnishing Company, holds the telephone line at 169 / 169a in the checked volumes of 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935 and 1937, which carries the firm's occupancy across the address-book silence in 1932, 1933 and 1937¹². J. A. van Duyn's own line moves from Rochussenstraat 171 to 169b and is attested there from 1933 to 1935¹³. The van Duijn household itself had moved into 169b two years earlier, on 8 December 1931, well before the telephone line followed¹⁴. Without the telephone directories, the missing address-book editions of 1932, 1933 and 1937 would look like a break in the commercial record, and they are not one.

The commercial record was not unbroken afterwards either. The May Blitz of 1940 destroyed the city-centre store of N.V. Mij. voor Woninginrichting P. van Reeuwijk, and for seven months, from 23 May to December, the firm ran temporary showrooms at 169 on the same telephone number van Duyn later kept¹⁵. That number's longer run, across firms and decades, is followed in the telephone arc.

What a blank means

An empty cell in this table can mean three different things, and the register keeps them apart because the address book's own printed rule makes that necessary. At the foot of its street list the directory states its limits: by design it leaves out the upper flats of weekly-rent dwellings, and weekly-rent dwellings below a set rental value¹⁶. Those are the cheapest homes on the street, the kind a live-in servant or a weekly tenant would occupy, so silence in the address book never proves that nobody lived there.

In some years no address book was printed at all: none for 1932, 1933, or 1936 through 1938¹⁷. For those years the directory simply cannot answer. In other years an edition exists but no occupant has yet been recovered from it. The two street-list blocks not yet independently re-read, 1910 and 1919, are tracked year by year, with their sources, in the years we cannot fill. On the page the three kinds of blank look the same, so the register marks which is which instead of leaving the reader to guess.

Two more stretches once looked like the same kind of blank. The years 1924 and 1925 were read from full-page scans of the street list, once the Rochussenstraat block that OCR had skipped was retrieved and re-read¹⁸. For those two years the printed street list did answer in the end. The street list itself failed for 1926, 1927 and a further stretch in the mid-1930s, and these had to be recovered another way, by searching a resident's surname in the address book's separate alphabetical name list¹⁹. Neither stretch is blank: one was read by the ordinary method with more effort, the other by going around it.

For these years most of the register rests on pages like these: a page of the address book's street list, and beside it a page from the separate name list used where the street list would not yield.

The clearest single page in the register is an earlier one: the 1913 street list, where the corner's four lines open the left column among some two hundred others on the same sheet.

On that page the painter son's line is printed directly above his father's, and it calls him kunstschilder and a drawing teacher²⁰.

What "resident" can and cannot mean

Not every name behind these rows is a household. In February 1950 a master cabinet-maker, recorded only by his surname, Van Kleef, worked at 169c "above Van Duyn" and advertised for an apprentice who is never named²¹. A "resident" in this register can be a tenant above a shop, a tradesman with no household of his own on record, or, most often and least visibly, domestic staff. Between 1939 and 1960 one household above the shop advertised for live-in and day help more than a dozen times²². Over the run its request shrank from a full-time live-in servant to three mornings a week, and not one advertisement names the person hired²³. A notice from a different household at 169b, in 1928, shows the same kind of advertisement a decade before that run began:

The register cannot claim to identify everyone who lived or worked at this address. It can only claim to show, row by row, what has actually been recovered and where the recovery stops.

An address-book listing records an address, not ownership, and a household-card entry records residence, not title. An absence here means only that no entry was recovered within the source and pages searched. It does not mean nobody was present.

The limits, plainly

The building was permitted in 1899²⁴ but not completed until 1901²⁵. The earliest address-book entries recovered for the corner are also from 1901, when the firm was already listed there²⁶. In January 1907, an illustrated trade-press interview placed the firm's move to this corner about 1900, "nu zeven jaren geleden"²⁷. That is a year earlier than the address-book record reaches, and it fits the firm operating at the corner by August 1900, with a partner living above the new factory by that November²⁸.

At the other end, the register's last entries are not residents at all. The venue agenda billed the Eddie Prévost Project on 8 March 2003 as the last concert at Rochussenstraat 169²⁹. The concert is documented with the rest of the venue's 2002–2003 programme on its own website, preserved in the Internet Archive³⁰. WORM's later account places its departure in November 2003, a date that remains probable³¹. A concert billing and an organisation's departure are not the same event.

Nor did the building simply stand empty between the furniture era and the venue. After the furniture trade closed in 1987, the children's theatre Duinpaleis occupied it for a season in 1989³². By 12 January 1994 the venue that became Dodorama was already programming concerts there, about a month before 13 February 1994, the opening date canonised in retrospect³³. The register cannot give the date the building was first entered outside either tenancy, nor the terms of the unlicensed occupation that followed, and what it says of them is probable, because that date is not itself documented³⁴.

One image a reader might expect to find here is deliberately missing: a 1987 Stadsarchief photograph catalogued for this corner, which the owner says does not show his building. It is kept off the site, and not used as a picture of no. 169, for the reasons set out in the false-positive method.