³⁰Thank You

Almost nothing on this site was found by the owner alone. It was found in the reading rooms and databases that other people keep, and the first thanks belong there. The Stadsarchief Rotterdam holds the building dossiers, the pandkaarten, the address books, the population registers and the Beeldbank that between them give the corner its permits, its residents and its earliest photographs. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek and its Delpher newspaper archive carry most of what is known about the firms that traded here, a century of daily and trade press. The Nationaal Archief holds the Handelsregister and the trademark series; the CBG Centrum voor Familiegeschiedenis, the family-advertisement index; and the Noord-Hollands Archief and the regional press portals turned up records the national indexes had lost. Behind the everyday facts of the address stand the municipal registers that feed the BAG and the Kadaster.

These are named as institutions, and the desk staff who answer a query are thanked as a group rather than by name, because none was asked to appear here. What each archive and platform actually contributed, and on what terms, is set out in the note on institutions and tools.

A history of a house eventually writes to the living. The two names cut into the first stone in 1899 belonged to the founders' small sons¹, and their families answered letters from a stranger asking about the two men who built the corner. Each person is thanked here only where a record of their consent to be named exists, and described where it does not.

On the van Duffelen side that consent is on record. Beverley Tyndall, a granddaughter of the painter Gerrit van Duffelen², sent family photographs and images of the painter's work, and her material is published here under the recorded credit "Collectie familie van Duffelen / Beverley Tyndall". What the family keeps runs to several of the painter's paintings and etchings and to his own artist's palette. Without her answer the first era of this site would have no face for the elder of the two boys on the stone.

The other founding line, the Pelt side, answered through Murk Arend Eland, of the Eland-Pelt family, who sent the family's photographs and objects and cleared them for the report under the credit "Collectie familie Eland-Pelt (via Murk Arend Eland)". Among them are two chairs the family attributes to the old works, an early family group photograph, and a likeness of Cornelis Pelt himself, the founder this project could otherwise put no face to. A picture cleared for showing is not by itself leave to name the people in it: anyone else in a family photograph is named only where a public role or a recorded consent covers the name. What each family gave, and on what terms, is set out in the note on the people who answered.

The corner's last working life, as a music venue between 1994 and 2003, can be reconstructed only because the people who made it have since spoken or written about it in public. Gerard Kranendonk, who started Dodorama and died in 1996, is thanked here for beginning the venue¹. The theatre-maker Erik-Ward Geerlings, whose group played the room in 1989 before the music began², belongs here beside them. Lukas Simonis programmed the music across both the Dodorama and the WORM years³ and, with Henk Bakker, set up WORM Sound Studios in the building⁴. Mariëtte Groot owned the record shop, according to a contemporary account⁵, and later gave the spontaneous name its tongue-in-cheek expansion⁶, and Mike van Gaasbeek's later retrospective essay tells how the WORM years there ended⁷. On a single later recollection, the foundation's first board appears to have been chaired by Jeroen Chabot, who was recruited by Hajo Doorn, Mariëtte Groot and Hans Beekmans⁸.

They are named here only in the public roles their own sources document, and thanked for the record they left rather than for anything private. Where a claim rests on one person's memory rather than a document, the site says so beside the sentence. Each of these people is carried, with the source for the role, in the register of venue and theatre makers.

Some of the debts are to people who build things and give them away. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine preserved the venue's own websites after they had gone, which is the reason the last decade can be told at all. Open Archieven and the civil-registry portals opened the registers by name; Discogs documented what was pressed to disc in the building; Wikimedia and Europeana supplied freely licensed images, the Anefo photo collection among them; and the RKD placed the painter in his profession.

One debt a reader has a right to hear stated plainly. Most of the reading, cross-checking and drafting on this site was done by AI systems, under the owner's direction, each reading treated as a first pass to be checked against the source. They are named for what they are, tools rather than authors: the systems used were chiefly Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex for the reading and writing, with a gateway of further models for cross-reads, printed-text recognition and image description. Handwriting was held to a stricter rule, read blind by two independent readers and weighed against the scan rather than trusted to one machine. What each did, and where a machine reading stops being a finding aid and has to be checked, is in the note on institutions and tools; the interpretation, and any error left in it, is the project's own.

Last, and warmest, the home itself. We are a family of four and a dog. I did not give this a year, only a month or so, and only the evenings and the nights, the hours after the house had gone quiet. While I sat up with a stranger's furniture and old music, the rest of the house went on being a home around me, and kept my place at the table in the morning. Thank you for that. It is the one part of all this I could never have researched.

I did it out of plain curiosity. I wanted to know what my home had been before it was mine. Who the two names were, cut into the stone a few steps from where we now eat dinner. And how two small boys, laying a stone one afternoon in 1899, helped raise a building that would go on to become a music venue and a cultural centre still alive in Rotterdam tonight.

There is one teacher I want to name. Professor Riccardo Danieli, at the classical lyceum, who taught me to study, to stay curious, to look at a thing directly and check it for myself, and to use my own head. He always kept something extra for the student who went off and did the research nobody had asked for. Professor, I think this time I have earned my ten out of ten for the extra mile. (I used AI to walk it. Sorry.) Let this stand as my small testament to what you taught, to curiosity, and to never quite finishing learning.

I wonder what this building will be in fifty or a hundred years.

Anyone who would like to correct any of this, or add to it, is asked to do so on the contacts page, the last page in the book, which comes next.