¹⁰Forty-Nine Years at No. 169

The man whose name hung over this door for forty-nine years did not start in furniture. Johan Andries van Duijn was born at Bergschenhoek on 7 January 1885¹. His son was born in Rotterdam on 22 December 1912 and given his father's own names, and the birth act entered the father, aged twenty-seven, as a kantoorbediende, an office clerk, living at Sophiakade 40a².

The salaried clerk of twenty-seven built the furniture business later, and gave this corner as his address in a 1938 advertisement³, near the far end of a working life. That is as much of the man as this chapter needs. The household he headed, his sons, the marriages that open the descendant lines and the two 1978 family notices that give the fullest surviving account of the family all belong to the register of the van Duijns. This chapter belongs to the shop.

The sources let us do little more than read the shop from outside. The first word of what stood in the window dates from August 1951: Prachtige Barok en Chippendale meubelen in onze etalage, splendid Baroque and Chippendale furniture in our window, printed above two telephone lines given as 30047-31805¹. This was period and reproduction furniture, sixteen years before the shop's 1969 copy about the better classical genre and thirty-six before its 1987 sale of classical pieces.

Passers-by saw the lettering across the facade: PULLMAN MATRASSEN, then J.A. van DUYN, then MEUBELEN and TAPIJTEN, furniture and carpets. The Stadsarchief caught it in February 1965, in a 1980 colour frame of the metro works and on 24 November 1981, and it was still up on 17 December 1989, two years after the firm had closed². No dedicated frontal photograph of the shopfront, and no picture of the interior, is known, so the corner survives as a facade glimpsed by passing cameras³. When lettering and advertising are all we have, we read the shop from them, as the note on how the record is read explains.

The biggest name on the front belonged to someone else. Pullman was a mattress maker that had entered the Dutch market in 1937 and opened a factory at Zwijndrecht after the war⁴. The deep dive on what the corner supplied compares the ships, hotels and brands behind that lettering source by source.

It would be tidy to say the corner stopped making furniture once it started selling it, but the sources say otherwise. In February 1950 a master cabinet-maker named Van Kleef was working at Rochussenstraat 169c, boven Van Duyn, above the van Duyn shop, and advertised in Het Vrije Volk for an apprentice cabinet-maker¹. A second advertisement, of 11 April 1950, gave the sub-unit as 169, C². Only his surname survives. He worked in the same unit, 169c, where Cornelis Pelt, one of the two founders, had lived until 1921³.

So a cabinet-maker was still cutting joints above the shop while a retailer traded below. The trades advertised from this one address run from 1900 to 1974: cabinet-makers, upholsterers and chair-makers in the factory years, then upholsterers, curtain-seamstresses and shop assistants in the shop years⁴. The last firm here did more than sell furniture, too. Its own death notice for the founder in January 1978, signed jointly by the personnel at Rochussenstraat 169, named it Woninginrichting en Scheepsstoffering, home furnishing and ship's upholstery⁵. After 1928 the work did not vanish; its centre of gravity moved.

Before 1959 the surviving records only partly identify the people who lived in the flats above the works and the shop. One of them the registers hold in full. Petronella Johanna Henriëtte van Vessem died at Rochussenstraat 169 on 22 July 1959, aged sixty-five, the first named private resident of the building, as distinct from the founding families and the firms¹. Born in Rotterdam on 26 June 1894, she married Jan Dino Adriaan Leeflang there on 11 July 1918 and was widowed on 19 January 1958, a year and a half before her own death². The Rotterdam family card gives her husband as a procuratiehouder, a holder of power of attorney, and lists two daughters, Adriana Margareta, born in 1922, and Margaretha, born in 1924³. We name her because we can; for most of the people who lived over the shop we cannot. How we avoid pinning a name like hers to the wrong person is explained in the note on false positives.

The shop's work reached well beyond its neighbourhood. In June 1950 a report on the Oud-Rotterdam attraction credited its interior to the firm¹. In 1959 the firm supplied vele tapijten en gordijnen, many carpets and curtains, for the new ss Rotterdam, flagship of the Holland-Amerika Lijn, and said so in its own testimonial advertisement².

In 1963 it took on the whole soft interior of the new Rotterdam Hilton as Interieur Adviseurs, interior advisers³. The carpets, curtains, beds, spreads, bolsters and plastic wall-covering were all entrusted to it⁴.

On the same day another Rotterdam firm, De Nijs' Meubelfabriek, advertised its own share of the hotel: the furniture of the two hundred guest rooms⁵. Two firms did two kinds of work on one building, and the split shows what this corner was and was not. De Nijs built interiors at scale. Later institutional accounts credit it, probably rightly, with executing two of the ss Rotterdam's public dining rooms⁶, and a 1957 brochure likewise credits it, probably rightly, with the Statendam's woodwork and furnishing⁷. In 1966 it carried out the panelling of the Sagafjord⁸. Van Duyn supplied the soft furnishings. The deep dive on what the corner supplied keeps the two roles apart, along with the maker's marks and brands around them.

The shop carried on into the 1970s much as before. In 1973 it was still trading uitsluitend Rochussenstraat 169a, only from 169a, on a new telephone number, 254992¹. The founder did not see the end. Johan Andries van Duijn died on 10 January 1978, aged ninety-three, in the Rotterdam care home De Schans, and his widow, Bernardina Arnolda van Duijn-Metz, died in the same home on 3 March 1978, aged eighty-five, less than two months after him^2 3. His son B. A. van Duijn ran the firm to the end⁴.

The end came as a sale. From 30 October to 5 November 1987 the firm advertised an opheffingsuitverkoop, a closing-down sale, of classical furniture at up to fifty per cent off at Rochussenstraat 169, closing about forty-nine years at the corner^5 6. After that, nothing. A systematic sweep of every paper still covering those years found no successor, takeover, merger or continuation⁷. There was only the sale, whose largest and last insertion ran on 5 November 1987, and then silence⁸. The firm's whole arc, from the 1938 arrival to that last insertion, is traced in the deep dive on Fa. J. A. van Duyn.

Close to ninety years of furniture-making and furniture-selling end here, on a fifty-per-cent notice and then silence. The next chapter turns to what passed across the corner's counters and benches in all those years: the meubelen, stoffen en tapijten themselves, the furniture, fabrics and carpets that a furnishing house is finally made of.