²Permit, Stone and Steam

On 7 November 1892 the cabinet-makers Van Duffelen & Pelt advertised a clearance of mahogany linen cupboards, a walnut salon cabinet and a writing bonheur from their rooms at Lange Warande 75-77, and they gave the plainest of reasons: they had no more room¹. The firm was not yet three years old. On 1 January 1892 its New Year's greeting had thanked customers at the close of its afgeloopen tweede jaarkring, its finished second year, and named it Meubelfabriekanten en Stoffeerders at that same address².

Room ran short again and again through that first decade. Van Duffelen & Pelt began trading about 1890 in rented rooms on the Lange Warande, first at no. 77 and then in the pair 75-77. By 1893 or 1894 they had moved to a workshop at Haagscheveer 34, where they stayed until the century turned³. No photograph of those doors is known, though the streets around them survive in a gallery of the firm's addresses.

Once, and handsomely, the record shows what those cramped rooms could produce. On 17 September 1895 Dr S. J. Halbertsma marked twenty-five years since his doctorate in medicine, and at nine that morning a committee of his patients brought him a present and an album with the givers' names¹. The present had been carved and assembled in Van Duffelen & Pelt's Haagscheveer workshop², and a Rotterdam paper wrote it up in strongly admiring terms.

The report describes an oak set of three pieces: a large book-cabinet, a smaller one and a chimney-piece cladding³. The paper called it een meesterstuk van meubelfabricatie, a masterpiece of furniture-making, and said it did its makers high honour⁴. Three Rotterdam men of the decorative arts were named in the report as having a hand in it. Arij Spoon designed it, the sculptor Simon Miedema modelled its carved figures, and Willem Adrianus Fabri painted the imitation-gobelin panel for the chimney-piece⁵.

This is the earliest piece the firm is known by name to have made, and nobody has been able to find it since. No catalogued Van Duffelen & Pelt object survives in a Dutch collection⁶. The search for the cabinet has its own deep dive, and so does the physician who received it. Four years before the first stone went down, the two men in the rented rooms were already making bespoke work fine enough for a city notable⁷.

On 14 April 1899 an application reached the Rotterdam building police, asking leave for a Pand ingericht tot Meubelmagazijn, werkplaats en woningen¹: in plain terms, a warehouse with workshop and dwellings². The corner plot sat at the raw edge of the newly gridded Middelland polder, its open side still facing the fields of the Land van Hoboken³.

The handwritten description named its clients in the courtly formula of the day: the works was to go up voor rekening van de Heeren van Duffelen en Pelt, on the account of the gentlemen van Duffelen and Pelt⁴. The firm of J. van Hattem was to build it⁵. Permission followed on 23 May 1899, stamped onto the sheets as decision No. 1488⁶.

In the same weeks the partners put their own house in order. They had traded informally since about 1890, and on 24 June 1899 they registered as a formal firm before the notary C. M. H. Minderop⁷, in the very month the first stone went down. The works are dated 1901^8 9, although the firm was already working from the corner in 1900¹⁰, and it was probably the first building ever raised on the street¹¹. The founding file is read sheet by sheet in the deep dive on the founding document. Its builder was an old family firm long out of the family's hands, which is another story again¹².

At the foot of the elevation is a signature that for a long time no one could put a name to. The architect Nicolaas Molenaar has sometimes been credited with it, wrongly¹. The hand is Nicolaas Tinbergen's, and three things fix it. An autograph of his survives from 1877. An 1892 Rotterdam birth act enters him as an architect at 1e Lombardstraat 30. And a small group of his own building permits from 1902 and 1903, catalogued under his name in the same archive series². One of them, a 1902 drawing for a pair of verandas at the Bethesda almshouse on the Oostmaaslaan, is signed in the very same hand³. The signature dossier lays the handwriting side by side.

The name matters more than a reader might think, because of what else Tinbergen was. On the first of January 1888 he had bought the old Rotterdam building firm J. van Hattem & Zoon and taken its head^4 5, and the office traded under his hand from then on⁶. That was the builder named on the 1899 application. The architect who drew the elevation and the builder who put it up were one enterprise, and both were Tinbergen⁷.

Almost everything Tinbergen built in Rotterdam has gone. The glass Passage, the Groote Schouwburg and the twin-towered Koninginnekerk were all demolished or bombed⁸, and a small furniture works on a quiet corner is now among the few of his buildings still standing⁹. His life and lost buildings fill the deep dive beside this section, and the firm whose name he kept over the door is the builder he had bought.

Floor by floor, the drawings show what the building was for. On a pile foundation stand a souterrain, a ground floor and three upper storeys¹. Every upper floor is drawn alike: a front block of domestic rooms on the street, and behind it a large open hall spanned by iron columns². Living and trading stayed low, with a dwelling, an office and a warehouse on the ground floor³ and a second dwelling and more storage above it⁴. The making went upstairs, to a workshop on the second floor, while the cellar was left for storage⁵. In one corner of the workshop a small room was walled in brick and iron for boiling glue⁶.

What drove the workshop is harder to say. Only the 1905 directory, of the whole series, called the works a stoommeub.fabr., a steam furniture factory, which most likely means the plant was steam-powered⁷. A steam engine needed a nuisance permit, and that permit would settle it. It has not turned up, and the question waits in an open question. The four sheets, read one at a time, are in the permit deep dive.

Eleven days after the permit was granted, the youngest people in the story did the ceremonial work. On 3 June 1899, with the foundation going in, the two founders' small sons laid the first stone¹. The carved stone is still set in the corner wall, and it still reads plainly².

Of the 1899 building, it is the one part a passer-by can still read from the pavement³.

Each boy has his own deep dive: Gerrit van Duffelen, painter and etcher, and the Pelt line, down to the living generation.

Trade came at once, and trouble not long after. By 3 August 1900 Van Duffelen & Pelt were advertising from the corner¹, and by early November one of the partners was living in the flat above the factory². Hiring had started even earlier, before the address had a settled name. On 11 June 1900 the firm's earliest labour advertisement asked for bekwame Meubelmakers en een Stoffeerder, skilled cabinet-makers and an upholsterer, at its Meubelfabriek³, and gave the corner as Coolhavenkade hoek 's Gravendijkwal⁴.

"Coolhavenkade" was only ever a working name for the corner's own street, used in the first years before the city fixed the frontages⁵. Rochussenstraat itself was named on 7 March 1900, after the painter Charles Rochussen⁶. A printed line speaks about a page as much as about a place, and a new address that wanders from one notice to the next is just the trap that reading the record is built around. The directories are blunt about what the works did in those first years. They filed the firm under schrijnwerkers, joiners, and added behangers en stoffeerders, paperhangers and upholsterers, only from 1904⁷. The corner made furniture before it finished and sold it⁸.

Trade also brought burglars. On the night of 4–5 November 1900 three men tried to break into the new factory⁹, and the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad told the rest under a spaced-out heading, Inbrekers verschalkt:

They had smashed a pane in the front door¹⁰. The electric alarm bell woke the manufacturer who lived above the works, the burglars fled empty-handed, and the police arrested three young men found nearby on suspicion¹¹. It is the bell that stays with you: an electric alarm in a works barely a year old, loud enough that November night to rout three men¹².

By then people were using the corner as an address for the ordinary business of life. In May 1902 G. J. van Duffelen advertised a violin for sale, fifteen guilders, from Rochussenstraat 169 hoek 's-Gravendijkwal¹³. That notice was long taken for the building's earliest trace, until the firm's own advertisements of two years before turned up¹⁴.

Every job the corner would advertise over the next three-quarters of a century is listed in its own register.

The building was up, the firm was in it, and the benches on the second floor were about to fill¹⁵. The next chapter goes to those benches, on the day a trade weekly finally walked in and photographed them.