The builder the architect had bought
The 1899 permit for the corner named as its builder the firm of J. van Hattem, a carpentry business on the 1e Lombardstraat. Jan Jansen van Hattem had founded it, and in his later years his son ran it; the son died before his father. By the day the permit was stamped, the name was already old. The family had gone, and the name hung on over the door of a workshop that now belonged to an architect. Here is the firm behind it: the founder, his son, and the sale that took it out of the family.
A carpenter's business on the Lombardstraat
Jan Jansen van Hattem kept a timmermansaffaire (a carpentry and building business) on the 1e Lombardstraat. He died on 22 March 1888, and the city entered his death in a plain act.
The clerk wrote it up in the register's set formula, and described the old builder in the words the register kept for a man no longer at work:
> No. 82. > On this day, the twenty-fourth of March eighteen hundred eighty-eight, there appeared before us, Registrar of the Civil Registry of the Municipality of Rotterdam: Daniel Visser, aged thirty-four years, by occupation attendant/official, and Dirk de Weij [?], aged fifty years, by occupation attendant/official, both residing here, no blood-relatives of the deceased named below, who declared to us that on the twenty-second of this month, at eight o'clock in the evening, in a house on the Havenstraat here, there died: Jan Jansen van Hattem, at the age of seventy-nine years, born and residing here, without occupation, formerly widower of Wilhelmina Hendrika den Hengst, lastly widower of Margaretha Alida Polderman, son of Wouter van Hattem and of Maria Hendrika Jansen, both deceased. And we have drawn up this act, signed after reading aloud by us and the declarants. > [signatures]
He was born in the city, the act says, and still lived there. His occupation is given as zonder beroep, without a profession.
The "& Zoon"
The Zoon in the firm's name was the founder's son Wouter. He ran the business in his father's later years and died in 1887, a year before the old man. His death is the turning point of the whole story.
The notice appeared in De Maasbode that September.
> This day, to the deep sorrow of myself, my Children and further family, there passed away my dearly > beloved Husband, Mr Wouter van Hattem J.Jzn., at the age of just over 46 years. > A. H. A. van Meigaarden — widow of W. van Hattem J.Jzn. > Rotterdam, 16 September 1887. (1821) Translation notes: names/address verbatim. J.Jzn. = "Jan Janszoon" (son of Jan) — the patronymic distinguishing him within the van Hattem family. Wed. = weduwe (widow). "(1821)" is the newspaper's advertisement number.
His widow signed the notice. It calls him Wouter van Hattem J.Jzn., that is Jan Janszoon, son of Jan, and that patronymic is what links the man who died in 1887 to the founder in the press.
Out of the family
With the son dead and the father old, the firm left the family altogether. The son's widow, A. H. A. van Meigaarden, signed it over. On 1 January 1888 the business, advertised under its full style J. J. van Hattem & Zoon, passed to the architect Nicolaas Tinbergen, who was its head from that day.
The sale as Tinbergen saw it, with the wording of the advertisement that announced it, is told in the deep dive on . What he kept was the name. The workshop went on trading as van Hattem's and only later took his own name, N. Tinbergen en Zoon; no dated notice from these years shows when the change came. One printed source does show how long the old name lasted. In 1901, thirteen years after the sale, the city directory still listed the firm at its Lombardstraat address as van Hattem.
So the name outlived the family by more than a decade. Eleven years after the sale, when the drawings for the furniture works at the corner went in, the builder they named was still "Firma J. van Hattem", though the firm had been Tinbergen's since 1888. The man who signed the elevation and the builder on the application were one enterprise, and it was Tinbergen's . The permit itself is laid out sheet by sheet in .
The other van Hattem firm
Two namesakes cloud the story. One is the Wouter born in 1840, met above. The other is the more tempting, because it puts a van Hattem into the furniture trade. A separate Rotterdam firm, "A. van Hattem & Zoon", worked as upholsterers and paperhangers from the Oppert. A furnishing house of that name, so close to a story about a furniture factory, invites the guess that its founder was a son of the builder van Hattem.
That guess can be tested in only one form, and in that form it fails. The founder of the building firm did have a son called Arie. A birth act enters him on 25 August 1846, and a death act of 3 September 1849 records that he died aged three years and eight days. Arie died as a small child, so he cannot be the "A." of the Oppert firm. That firm traded from Oppert 78, with no traced tie to Van Duffelen & Pelt or to the corner, and a Delpher search pairing the van Hattem name with Rochussenstraat 169 finds nothing at all. Whether the two van Hattem families were more distantly related, the sources do not say. They show only that no tie between the Oppert firm and this building has been found.
By 1899 the firm the permit named had been a Tinbergen business for eleven years, and it still went out into the city under the name of a carpenter who had died in 1888.