You’ve Probably Walked Past Hundreds of Them

Amsterdam has plenty of famous landmarks. There are seventeenth-century canal houses, church towers, crooked façades and bridges that have survived several centuries of bicycles, boats and questionable parking decisions.

And then there is a small red-brown metal post.

It stands barely a metre tall, carries three white crosses and has spent much of its working life being bumped into, chained to bicycles and ignored by almost everyone walking past it. Yet somehow, the Amsterdammertje became one of the most recognisable objects in Amsterdam.

Which raises a reasonable question.

Why did Amsterdam need so many little posts in the first place?

It Started With Horses, Carts and Corners

The Amsterdammertje wasn’t created to become a city icon. It had a much less glamorous job: protecting Amsterdam from Amsterdam traffic.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the city’s narrow streets were still busy with horse-drawn carts and wagons. Their wheels had iron rims, which weren’t particularly kind to buildings, bridges or street corners when drivers turned a little too enthusiastically.

The heavy cast-iron posts acted as schamppalen, protecting vulnerable corners from passing wheels. They were also used to close narrow alleys and footbridges to traffic. An early drawing of the familiar iron Amsterdammertje, complete with three St Andrew’s crosses, dates from 1903 and was made for the Melkmeisjesbrug over the Brouwersgracht.

So before it spent decades fighting cars, the Amsterdammertje was fighting carts.

Traffic changes. Amsterdam apparently keeps needing protection from it.

Three Crosses and a Very Amsterdam Identity

What transformed an ordinary piece of street furniture into something unmistakably Amsterdam were the three white crosses on its side.

They’re the same St Andrew’s crosses found on Amsterdam’s coat of arms and flag, symbols that have been associated with the city for centuries. Their exact original meaning remains uncertain, although that hasn’t stopped generations of people from trying to explain them. One popular story says they represent fire, floods and the plague, three disasters Amsterdam knew rather well. It’s a wonderful explanation.

It just isn’t historically proven.

The crosses themselves, however, became inseparable from Amsterdam’s visual identity. They appeared on buildings, flags, manhole covers and eventually these little iron posts scattered across the streets.

Put three crosses on a bollard and apparently even traffic control can become branding.

Then the Cars Arrived

As Amsterdam entered the age of the automobile, the Amsterdammertje found itself with a whole new enemy.

After the Second World War, the posts were increasingly used to prevent illegal parking. Cars were taking over streets that had never been designed for them, and Amsterdam needed something sturdy enough to stop drivers from turning every available piece of pavement into a parking space.

Conveniently, the city already had thousands of extremely heavy iron posts.

The original cast-iron Amsterdammertjes weighed somewhere between 80 and 100 kilograms, which made moving them about as enjoyable as you might imagine. By the 1960s, Amsterdam’s Public Works Department began searching for a cheaper, lighter alternative. In 1972, the first sheet-steel versions were installed in the Korte Leidsedwarsstraat. They weighed less than 25 kilograms but kept the familiar shape and crosses.

By then, the little post had become part of Amsterdam’s streetscape.

And there were a lot of them.

The Bollard Became the Problem

For decades, Amsterdammertjes lined pavements, protected corners and prevented cars from parking where they shouldn’t. They were practical, recognisable and thoroughly Amsterdam.

There was just one slight problem.

Amsterdam’s streets became absolutely full of stuff.

Bollards, traffic signs, advertising boards, utility boxes, bicycle racks and countless other objects competed for limited space. Eventually, the city began trying to make its streets less cluttered. Pavements could often be redesigned so that cars were kept out without requiring a small army of metal posts.

And so Amsterdam began removing its own icon.

By 2013, around 10,000 Amsterdammertjes had reportedly disappeared in just four years, while very few new ones were being installed.

After spending decades stopping things from getting in the way, the Amsterdammertje had officially become something that was getting in the way.

There is something beautifully Amsterdam about that.

Too Amsterdam to Actually Disappear

Look around the city today and you’ll still find Amsterdammertjes, particularly in older streets, but nowhere near in the numbers they once occupied Amsterdam’s pavements.

Their disappearance from the streets hasn’t exactly damaged their popularity.

The little post escaped into the rest of the city instead. Its shape and three crosses appear on souvenirs, miniature versions, decorations and even chocolates. Some former Amsterdammertjes have found their way into gardens, where a piece of municipal traffic infrastructure somehow manages to look sentimental.

Perhaps that’s what happens when an object stands quietly in the same city for generations. Nobody sets out to love it. It simply becomes part of the background until someone decides to take it away.

Then suddenly everybody notices.

Amsterdam’s Smallest Icon

The next time you walk through Amsterdam, keep an eye on the edge of the pavement.

Between the bicycles, bridges, canal houses and café terraces, you might spot one: red-brown metal, three white crosses, quietly standing guard over a corner it has probably been protecting for decades.

It was never designed to be beautiful. It wasn’t built as a monument and nobody expected visitors to photograph it.

It was just a practical solution to an everyday Amsterdam problem.

And perhaps that’s exactly why the Amsterdammertje became so Amsterdam.