Dated turning points

Here the turning points of the corner's whole story stand in order. They come from all the sources at once: a medieval dyke, an estate sale, a building permit, a firm's documented presence and its departure, a billed performance, a purchase. Each row is a moment the rest of the site tells at length, cut down to a date, a line and the sources behind it. The chronology proves nothing that a page elsewhere has not already proved. It simply shows the order of things.

The list is short on purpose. It gives the year a firm reached the corner, but not each advertisement it placed; the night a venue opened, but not every concert on the bill. For the full run, turn to the separate registers of performances and residents. Some rows fix a single day, others only a year or a stretch of years, exactly as the sources leave them. Where the record gives no closer date, none is invented.

The chronology reaches beyond the building. Its earliest rows are landscape history: the medieval dyke the street still follows, an estate sale, de Jongh's 1887 'Gewijzigd plan voor de Coolpolder', approved in 1892, which laid out the street grid¹, all long before anyone built on this corner. A few later rows happen elsewhere but explain the corner: a firm's fire in another part of the city, a merger downtown, a takeover. Nor is it a diary. A blank stretch between rows does not mean nothing happened then, or that no source survives. It means only that nothing in it rose to a turning point.

Some rows need a caution longer than one line. The 1887 de Jongh street plan rests only on a probable reading². So does the 1932 directory entry, which probably lists van Duyn among the directors of the Furnishco firm³. The 1938 row records only the name J. A. van Duyn and this address in a private classified advertisement, and that does not establish the firm's arrival. The firm's own advertising that we hold begins in October 1939, a difference set out in the firm's own deep dive⁴. The 1989 row keeps a newspaper's advance billing apart from probable UvA catalogue metadata for the youth-theatre classification, premiere date and performing credit^5 6. The 1994 row gives Dodorama's February opening, yet by Wednesday 12 January 1994, a month earlier, the venue was already advertising concerts at the squatted 169, as the occupancy register records⁷.

One turning point is cut into the building itself. On 3 June 1899 the two founders of the works had their young sons lay the first stone, with the boys' names carved into it⁸. The stone still sits in the corner brickwork, a diagonal crack across one side⁹. The present owner photographed it in 2026, and it still names Gerrit van Duffelen, aged nine, and Cornelis Pelt, aged six, and the day¹⁰.

The two ages match the boys' own birth records: Gerrit van Duffelen was born in September 1889 and Cornelis Pelt in November 1892, so on the day they were nine and six. The stone was laid in the same month that the partnership was drawn up before the notary Minderop, on 24 June 1899. Two bounded newspaper searches found no report of the ceremony, though that does not prove none was published¹¹.

One thread runs on past the chronology's last row to the present. The building's present owner acquired a watercolour by that same first-stone boy in August 2026: De Rijn vanaf de Grebbeberg, signed by Gerrit van Duffelen¹². It lies outside the dated run of 1358 to 2019, but it brings the corner's story to the present and belongs in the family's own collection.