Who owned the building?
Rochussenstraat 169 had a great many occupants in its first century, and many of them have names: the cabinet-makers who built the works, the furnishing firms on the ground floor, the households above them and, at the very end, a theatre and a music venue. The owner almost never appears. Who held the title to the building, as against who worked or lived in it, is a separate question, and for most of the building's life we cannot answer it.
The two ends we can document
The recent end is better documented. The private development partnership MICO ontwikkelingscombinatie renovated the whole block into owner-occupied homes, to a design by the architects Van Herk & De Kleijn, with the work running through to 2009. The scheme took in Rochussenstraat 169–191 and 's-Gravendijkwal 37–165: some forty-two dwellings, thirty-three of them owner-occupied. The present owner-occupied homes, this one among them, came out of that conversion. The records name the developer, but not the person or body that held title to the building before the conversion.
The architects photographed the work. The shell is gutted to bare brick and timber, the floors are torn out, and yellow steel props shore up the openings while new stud walls go up inside the old masonry.
Before the redevelopment, the title trail goes dark just where the building's story is strangest. Firma J. A. van Duyn, the last furniture shop, held its closing-down sale from late October 1987, though an advertised sale does not tell us when the tenancy ended. In 1989 , and by January 1994 Dodorama was already programming concerts there. A later account calls the venue a squat; a 2002 article says it may have stood empty for more than twelve months before that and may have been held under an informal tolerance, a gedoogstatus, at a low rent. Neither endpoint shows that the building stood empty all the way from the 1987 sale. The same 2002 article says the venue may have missed a deadline of 1 December 2001 to leave under demolition plans, and WORM's own retrospective describes its departure in November 2003 as a likely eviction. Theatre, squat, tolerated venue, eviction: no record we hold names the legal owner through any of it.
The furniture century is hardly better. Address books and trade registers name the firms on the ground floor and the families who lived over them, and they say when a household came and went. One of the founding partners' families, the Van Duffelens, left the corner for Zeist in May 1921. But these books record tenancy and residence, not the freehold. When they do use the word owner, they mean something else. In 1926 the commercial register calls one man sole owner of Continental Carpet: owner of the firm, at its registered Coolsingel address, not of this building.
Where the evidence stops
We have not obtained the land registry's history of title. The records that could fill the chain next are the notarial transfers in the Stadsarchief reading room and the 2009 splitting deed through the land registry. A log of targeted searches in the digitised Delpher newspapers from 1899 to 2009 records sales of furniture stock and notices of shop leases at the corner, but no notice of a transfer of the building itself.
What would settle it
A chain of title starts with the national land registry's record of former owners. The notarial transfers can be read at the Stadsarchief, the 2009 splitting deed comes from the land registry, and a Chamber of Commerce file may shed light on the development partnership. Those routes may identify who held the title; what we have now does not.