¹²Empty, Then the Puinpaleis

On 30 October 1987 the Algemeen Dagblad carried a boxed advertisement for Firma J. A. van Duyn at Rochussenstraat 169: a closing-down sale of classical furniture, at up to fifty per cent off¹.

An opheffingsuitverkoop is a liquidation clearance, the sale a firm holds when it is winding up for good. This one ran from 30 October to 5 November 1987 and ended about forty-nine years of van Duyn trading at the corner². The building's longest single occupant went out in a week.

The advertisement gives the discount but says nothing about what happened next. It does not give the firm's last day at the address, the date the premises were emptied, or the moment a later occupation began³. From here the sources thin out, and much of what follows cannot be dated. With the shop gone, the building left retail use⁴. It did not simply stand empty until a squat: a children's theatre most likely used it across 1989, the subject of the next section⁵. When squatters first moved in is not documented⁶. The far end of the gap is clearer. Concerts were being played in the building by January 1994⁷, about a month before 13 February 1994, the date worm.org and Wikipedia would later give as the opening⁸. So just over six years passed between the closing sale and the first attested concert, with a year of theatre in the middle and very little else on the page.

What mattered most for what came next was the status the empty building acquired. A property left vacant for more than twelve months probably could not be cleared quickly, so whoever moved back in seems to have stayed on under an informal, low-rent toleration instead of being besieged and evicted⁹. That is not the same as legal tenancy, and legal tenancy is not claimed here. Who owned the freehold through the empty years is not established. The wider ownership question runs on to the 2009 redevelopment and belongs to the closing era, where the ownership gap takes it up.

There is almost nothing to look at from these years. What survives is the setting, not the shopfront. A 1992 street view looks down the Rochussenstraat from the Zimmermanweg, past an office tower and a planted traffic island; no. 169 is nowhere in the frame.

One photograph is catalogued as this corner: advertising hoardings on the bricked-up and boarded-up nos. 167 and 169 in 1987¹⁰. The hoardings are fixed to the brick facade itself, whose ground floor is boarded up, rather than set up in front of it. The present owner of no. 169, who knows its facade, says the building shown is not no. 169, so the photograph is not shown here as a picture of the house¹¹. The dispute, and what would settle it, are set out in the false-positive method.

The address misleads in more ordinary ways too. Search the digitised press for "Rochussenstraat 169" and the same false positives keep turning up. The worst offender is The Hague's own Rochussenstraat 169, in the Schilderswijk, which supplies lost-property lists, a maid's advertisement and a 1934 vacancy that names Den Haag outright¹².

For one year the shut door opened onto a stage. On Saturday 4 February 1989 Het Vrije Volk listed Puinpaleis in its agenda: the Paleis Toneel Theater would stage it the next afternoon at half past two, at a venue called Duinpaleis, Rochussenstraat 169¹.

The two names are almost a joke the building made about itself. The venue was the Duinpaleis, the dune palace. The show was Puinpaleis, a pun on puin, rubble: a rubble palace, staged in a corner the sources had gone quiet on². Puinpaleis was a 1989 trilogy in three parts, and a secondary source says more about its first part than the newspaper does. The Theatercollectie catalogue of the University of Amsterdam records Puinpaleis: deel 1: In de eetkamer as a Paleis Toneel Theater youth-theatre production, premiered on 5 February 1989, with the theatre-maker Erik-Ward Geerlings among its performers, and this secondary record is probably right³. A catalogue entry is not a programme or a photograph, so the part-one title, the premiere date and the youth-theatre label remain probable. The address is firmer, because the contemporary newspaper gives it⁴.

Not everything once linked to the company holds up. A title from Geerlings' own list of works, Wie vermoordde Willem Goossens?, was for a time dated to 2 April 1989 at the corner. That date turns out to belong to the premiere of Puinpaleis deel 2, so the two had been mixed up. Whether the piece ever played no. 169 is unproven. The venue was still billing shows in December. A cultural agenda of 14 December 1989 advertised two more Duinpaleis productions at Rochussenstraat 169: the late-night cabaret Het obscene eekhoorntje at half past eleven on Saturday 16 December, and a family show for ages six and up, De dame en de neushoorn, the next afternoon⁵. The cabaret was performed by De Pragmatici, Geerlings' own theatre group⁶. The interlude between shop and squat sets out the whole year of theatre, with every dated entry.

That cabaret also leads into the building's next life. Among the Pragmatici was a Rotterdam composer, Arthur Sauer, who played the obscene eekhoorntje cabaret in 1989. By October 1995 he was back at the same address, on the bill at the music venue then running in the building⁷. That venue would sell no furniture and stage no children's plays. It played modern music, and it was already tuning up in the first weeks of 1994. Its story, and that of the people who opened the door, is the next chapter.