¹Before the House

Long before there was any building here, the corner had a line on the ground. In 1358 a dyke is recorded here as the 's-Gravendijk, in the ambacht Cool, east of het Middelland¹. An ambacht was a rural jurisdiction, and het Middelland, the middle land, was the open ground of the polder, the diked and drained land behind it. The dyke held its course across that country for centuries before anyone drew a street on it, and the broad avenue the works would one day face grew out of it.

When the city at last laid out this quarter, it kept the dyke's course and its name in the avenue now called the 's-Gravendijkwal, the embankment of the count's dyke². The corner faces that avenue. For the Dutch words of the polder landscape there is a short glossary, and the district as mapmakers drew it before 1900 has its own gallery of old maps.

The second decision, in 1835, was a private one. On 20 August that year the Van Hoboken family bought a country estate of about 56 hectares, with its western edge along the 's-Gravendijkwal¹. Until the early 1930s the 's-Gravendijkwal simply ended at that estate, level with the future Rochussenstraat, and went no further south².

The city wanted the land, but the heirs would not sell, and the municipality could not buy the estate until 1924, for f4,000,000³. That single refusal kept the low-numbered eastern stretch of the future street open for a generation⁴, while streets went up all around it.

That open stretch matters for the address, as the last section of this chapter explains. The deep dive on the Land van Hoboken follows the estate's boundaries and its long standoff with the city that kept it off the market. Where the family's money came from is a harder story, told in the next section and in its own note.

The family were shipowners. Anthony van Hoboken's shipping firm held a Dutch-government contract, and between 1831 and 1842 it used more than ten of its ships to carry some 2,000 to 2,300 African men to the Dutch East Indies as colonial soldiers¹. They were recruited at Elmina on the Gold Coast, many of them bought or freed from slavery on condition that they enlisted, and shipped east to serve in the KNIL, the colonial army². In 2022 his statue on the Veerhaven was tagged SLAVENHANDELAAR, slave trader³.

The Van Hobokens play no part in the story of a furniture works: they owned the field across the road and nothing more. That field helped shape the corner, so their trade is named here. A separate note sets out what the sources establish and where they stop.

The third decision was clerical, yet the address makes no sense without it. Until 1872 Rotterdam numbered its houses by district, with wijknummers or district numbers, a system in use since 1846¹. In 1872 the city dropped that system and numbered houses straatsgewijze, by street, so that each street ran its own sequence². Under this system a street named in 1900 could give a building on its corner a single running number. The number itself, and the puzzle it set, are worked through in the deep dive on number 169.

The fourth decision drew the grid the house sits in. G. J. de Jongh (1845 to 1917) was director of Gemeentewerken, Rotterdam's municipal works, from 1879 to 1910¹. The avenues of Middelland and the Nieuwe Westen, among them the 's-Gravendijkwal and the future Rochussenstraat, were laid out on his Gewijzigd plan voor de Coolpolder, his revised Coolpolder plan, which the city council approved in 1892².

These avenues are most likely de Jongh's own. The district is usually traced to his earlier Coolpolder plan of 1887, the city's first move west after it annexed the neighbouring town of Delfshaven in 1886, though that 1887 attribution is only probable³. The 1887 sheet probably was not the plan that got built, since the archive that holds it notes that the design was not executed⁴. What actually reached the ground was the revised plan the council approved in 1892⁵. Either way, the streets here were engineered onto open polder and not grown from an old village lane.

On that plan the avenues are drawn and the block is set years before anyone builds on the corner. The sheet maps the district, not the single plot. It hangs with the older maps of the same ground in the gallery of maps before 1900.

By 1900 the corner had its two permanent street names, and for a short while a third that almost no one remembers. The Rochussenstraat was named on 7 March 1900, in the quarter Rotterdam set aside for its painters, after Charles Rochussen, who had died six years earlier¹. He was a Rotterdam painter of the previous generation². The street honours the artist. Its naming came in March 1900, after the first stone of the corner house had been laid in June 1899³, and a year before that house was finished⁴. The deep dive on the namesake shows his portrait and the painters' quarter around him.

The cross street kept the older name: the medieval 's-Gravendijk became the 's-Gravendijkwal, a broad avenue that carries a dyke recorded in 1358 into a modern grid⁵. Before the name Rochussenstraat was fixed, though, the corner's own street went by a working name, Coolhavenkade. The population register recorded the address as Coolhavenkade 169, the same number on the same corner that became Rochussenstraat 169⁶. The name pointed to a harbour, the Coolhaven, that had not yet been dug⁷. It lasted only the year or two while the street was being laid out, and it leaves no trace in the digitised Rotterdam press of 1880 to 1899⁸.

Search the newspapers only for "Rochussenstraat" and the building's first year disappears, because its earliest records sit under Coolhavenkade. A printed address says something about a page as well as a place, as reading the record explains.

The question this whole research grew out of is how the first house on a brand-new street came to be number 169. On the evidence gathered, the best answer is that the number never counted buildings. The Rochussenstraat appears to have been planned as one continuous line of about 1.9 kilometres, from the Eendrachtsplein near the city centre out to the Aelbrechtskade in Delfshaven, with its numbers set along that whole projected line from the centre outward¹.

Read that way, 169 most likely marks a place on the projected street, counted from the centre rather than by order of building, with the roughly 168 lower numbers assigned to the stretch across the Land van Hoboken². That eastern stretch was the private meadow, unbuildable until the city bought it in 1924 and built out only in the 1930s³. If this reading holds, the house with the high number is the early one and the low numbers came late, the reverse of what the number seems to promise. The evidence for this reading is circumstantial. The number 169 deep dive works it through in full, including the one municipal record still to be pulled, and reading the record sets out how far a printed address can prove a place.

Stand on the corner in 1898 and the maps show what the four decisions had made: fresh street frontage at the edge of the newly gridded Middelland polder, a broad avenue on the old dyke line, and open estate across the road⁴. Nothing stood there yet.

In 1899 the plot was commissioned for building, on the account of the gentlemen van Duffelen and Pelt⁵. The next chapter opens at their drawing table.