⁸The Meadow Closes In

For some thirty years the corner looked out largely on grass. East of the 's-Gravendijkwal lay the Land van Hoboken, a 56-hectare estate the city had bought from the Van Hoboken family in 1924¹. The quiet frontage the two boys had laid a stone for² faced open polder. Below it, most of the low numbers of the Rochussenstraat existed only on a plan.

In the 1930s they got their buildings. The eastern stretch of the street, everything below about 169, was laid out on ir. W. G. Witteveen's Uitbreidingsplan Dijkzigt, the Dijkzigt expansion plan for the former estate³. The Unilever office came in 1931, Museum Boijmans in 1935 and the Erasmiaans Gymnasium in 1937⁴. Numbers that had been notional for a generation now stood for real addresses.

So the high number over the door had never said anything about the building's age. No. 169 was most likely counted from the Eendrachtsplein along the whole projected line of the street, so that its number most likely fixed its position rather than its place in the building order, and the roughly 168 lower numbers belonged to the estate that was only now being filled in⁵. The estate itself, how the city bought it and how long it refused to sell, has a deep dive of its own.

The district was filling in around the corner too, not only below it. In 1932 someone on the roof of the municipal electricity building made a lantern slide looking west over the rooftops of Rotterdam-West, with a single cleared lot still open among the terraces

Looking back down the same street also corrects an easy assumption: no. 169 was never the Rochussenstraat's only furniture works. The 1918 street list prints Breedveld, C., meubelfabriek, a furniture factory, at no. 107⁶. In that year the list's range line changes for the first time in the whole run, from Nos. 119a-391 to Nos. 107-391, apparently to take it in⁷. By 1923 the same firm is set down more grandly, as Breedveld's fabriek voor binnenbetimmering en meubileering, a works for interior joinery and furnishing, at no. 107a⁸. By 1918 at the latest, a second furniture factory stood on the same street, some sixty house numbers lower down.

Then came a public work on a far larger scale. The Maastunnel was built between 1937 and 1942 and opened on 14 February 1942¹. It was the world's first immersed-tube road tunnel, afgezonken rather than dug: ir. J. P. van Bruggen of Gemeentewerken, working with the architect Ad van der Steur, had it laid in sections on the river bed². Traffic reached it from the north along a sunken approach road on the 's-Gravendijkwal, the tunneltraverse on route S100, designed from about 1939 to run past the 169 corner and across the Rochussenstraat³.

The works arrived at the crossing while the tunnel itself was still going in. A rare colour photograph of about 1938 to 1939 shows the corner fenced off for building. There are timber hoardings and scaffolding poles, a site shed, and an open cobbled space with two men crossing it on one bicycle, while a boarding sign for a motor garage, Autobedrijf Victoria, repeats along the fence

One building did go up at the corner in these years. In 1939 the residential block Tunnelzicht, designed by the architect J. P. L. Hendriks, went up at 's-Gravendijkwal 150-160, diagonally across from no. 169⁶. The name means a view of the tunnel. A corner that had once faced hayfields now faced flats named after the scheme that was remaking the district.

Two pictures show the change side by side. The open Land van Hoboken survives in period postcards and in one painting made almost too late to record it¹. Cornelis Pieter Kruithof's oil Land van Hoboken te Rotterdam vanuit het westen, the Land van Hoboken at Rotterdam seen from the west, shows haymakers in blue smocks working the polder, with the city's church towers on the horizon². He painted it in the 1930s, in the estate's last open years³.

Set that painted meadow beside the fenced crossing of 1938, and the whole change shows in a single look.

The building at the centre of it all is the one least often photographed. For its first decades the corner turns up mostly in views of everything around it, the meadow, the avenue, the district filling in, and hardly ever in a picture of its own. The earliest known image of the house is a facade plate in a trade weekly rather than a street photograph⁴. Captioned VOORGEVEL FABRIEK EN MAGAZIJN, the front of the factory and warehouse, it was printed with an illustrated interview in 1907⁵. That interview, and everything photographed inside the works for it, has its own deep dive.

The hunt for pictures of this corner had its false trails. Some beliefs held for years later had to be given up, some image banks came back empty, and others returned the same meadow again and again. The corner picture gallery tells that story in full and sets out the same viewpoint plate by dated plate, from the 1907 facade to the present⁶.

The corner would need every picture it could keep. In May 1940 the fire that destroyed the centre of Rotterdam stopped short of the 's-Gravendijkwal, and this frontage, west of the line, was spared⁷. The next chapter follows what that reprieve meant for the furnishing shop that held the corner by then⁸.