Four sheets and two property cards

On 14 April 1899 an application went in to the Rotterdam building police for a furniture warehouse, workshop and dwellings on the corner parcel, in the Delfshaven cadastral section. Everything else in this dossier grows out of that one file. The street would not be called Rochussenstraat until March 1900¹, so the file places the site by its section and a provisional quayside name. The application's first sheet puts the entrance aan de Kanaalkade (on the canal quay), and the cadastral extract calls the spot the nieuwe kade bij 's Gravendijkwal (new quay by 's-Gravendijkwal). The site is not yet named by the street it now carries, though the number 169 already stands against the parcel on the cadastral sheet. The dossier opened on it, numbered 1899-0786, is the building's founding document. The permit was granted on 23 May 1899, and the works were up by 1901². Four sheets survive from the file, and two later municipal property cards carry its paper trail into the building's later life.

The founding is also set in the building itself. On 3 June 1899, days after the permit came through, the founders' young sons laid the first stone: Gerrit van Duffelen, aged nine, and Cornelis Pelt, aged six³. The carved stone is still in the corner wall, and its incised capitals name the two boys and the date:

The carved first stone as it survives today, set in the red-brick corner wall and photographed by the owner in 2026; a diagonal crack crosses its right-hand side (owner's photograph).

The application

The first sheet is the request itself, written by hand and headed as a description attached to the petition of 14 April 1899.

This is the paperwork of a permission rather than a drawing, and it names the men the works were built for. The building went up voor rekening van de Heeren van Duffelen en Pelt⁴, on the account of the two furniture-makers⁵, and the builder was the firm of J. van Hattem⁶, the contractor who put the corner up.

The cadastral extract

The second sheet maps the ground. It is an uittreksel uit het kadastrale plan, an extract from the cadastral plan, which locates the plot in the Delfshaven section at a scale of one to twenty-five hundred.

It fixes the parcel the works would stand on. Like the rest of the file it bears the decision stamp of mayor and aldermen, behoort bij besluit van Burgemeester en Wethouders van Rotterdam (belongs to the decision of Rotterdam's mayor and aldermen), no. 1488. It carries no written technical specification. The description proper is the application on the first sheet, and this dossier holds no separate bestek (written specification).

The plans

The whole building can be read from the third sheet. Titled No. I and drawn at one to a hundred, it sets out six floor plans, from the pile foundation and the souterrain up through the ground floor and the three upper storeys⁷.

A legible derivative of the same sheet makes its labels readable and names all six plans. Along the top run 1ste, 2de and 3de etage, and below them paalfundeering, souterrain and begane grond (first, second and third floor; pile foundation, basement and ground floor). The iron floor girders are given by profile: INP 32 at 0.20 m and INP 36 at 0.18 m. The sheet bears the same besluit (decision) stamp of mayor and aldermen, no. 1488, as the rest of the file, and the architect's cursive signature sits at the lower left, beneath the pile-foundation plan. The stamp dates the approval of the drawings to 26 April 1899, nearly a month before the final decision recorded on the application, 23 May.

The sheet's own title calls the building a meubelfabriek, a furniture factory, and the written application sets out its use floor by floor⁸. Living and trading were kept low: a dwelling, an office and a warehouse shared the ground floor, with a dwelling and a warehouse on the floor above⁹. The making went on higher up, in a workshop on the second floor, with a plan for a third floor drawn above it¹⁰. The workshop held a brick-walled enclosure, closed by iron doors, for heating materials and boiling glue, and the cellar was set aside for storage¹¹.

Of everything on the sheet, that walled enclosure for heating glue and materials is the one detail that reads like a factory and not a house. The drawings do not say what machinery filled the workshop. The file that would tell us is a nuisance permit we cannot read.

The elevations

The fourth sheet, No. II, draws the building's faces: the street elevation, a long section and the rear¹².

Its legible derivative sets the three faces (front, longitudinal section and rear) above a lower row of three joist plans: balklaag begane grond, balklaag 1e etage and kapbalklaag, the floor and roof framing.

Like sheet No. I, this one is signed at its foot. The hand is attributed to the architect Nicolaas Tinbergen, whose autograph of 1877 matches it¹³.

The permit signature compared: the Tinbergen / architect hand at the foot of the sheet, beside his own dated autograph exemplars. It is the same hand, and it ties the drawings to the man who also headed the building firm named on the application^14 15. That single match is no longer all the attribution rests on. The archive itself catalogues six Rotterdam building permits of 1902–1903, in the same series as this dossier, under the field Architect: N. Tinbergen, and two of them carry his autograph: one on a signed architect's drawing sheet, the other on a signed specification¹⁶.

Nicolaas Tinbergen (1854–1934), the architect whose hand signed the sheets¹⁷, in a 1913 jubilee portrait. It is a public-domain press halftone, and one of only two known likenesses of him¹⁸.

The two property cards

Two later municipal property cards, pandkaarten, carry the record forward. Each lists one address's rooms on the front and its permit history on the back. The first is for 169a.

By the 1943 survey noted on it, the card describes 169a as wholly office and warehouse. The permit history is on the reverse.

The reverse gives a short chronology. It opens with the founding entry, Stichting, 23-5-1899, B.W. 786/1899, records a completion inspection in January 1952, and ends with a change of designated use in 1987¹⁹. The card's technical matrix, with its ruled columns for storey height and floor area among others, was left blank all the way down the page.

The second card is for 169b.

It goes through the dwelling room by room, a home on the ground and first floors with an office and a day-room, and enters the weekly rent. The filled table puts the ground-floor rent at ƒ13.46 a week, with two rooms, an alcove, a kitchen or storage space and one business room; the first floor has three rooms and a bathroom. Of the four faces, this card's reverse gives the founding entry in the clearest hand.

The back records the building as founded on 23 May 1899 under building-police file 786 of 1899, the same file as dossier 1899-0786²⁰. It also has one later entry the other card lacks: a nadere opgave (further entry) converting the upper and first floors of 169b to office use, under permit V 774/48c of 23 August 1977²¹. Between them, the two cards keep the founding entry and the few municipal notes that followed it²².

What is not on the sheets

The dossier also corrects a story. Two figures about this building sometimes turn up as if they came from these drawings: a table of internal ceiling heights and a precise ground-floor area²³. Neither is on the four sheets. The 1899 drawings mark only horizontal dimensions, and no ceiling-height table or area figure was ever written on them²⁴. The property cards did not supply them either: on the 169a card, the columns that would have held a storey height and a floor area are the blank ones. The measurements were invented, so they are set aside here.

The later index has gaps of its own. Apart from the two cards, the only permits catalogued for the address after 1899 are two of 2002: dossier 2002-5886, for façade renewal and a foundation improvement covering 169 and 171, and dossier 2002-5707, for garden sheds at 169A²⁵. No permit dossier is indexed for the arrival of the furniture dealer J. A. van Duyn in 1938, for the Duinpaleis theatre of 1989, or for the conversion to a venue in 1994²⁶. An absence from the address index does not, though, prove that no such dossier was ever opened.

What the sheets do carry is enough. They show a furniture works, permitted on a spring day in 1899, drawn from its piles to its roofline, and standing on the corner two years later.