What Happened to Amsterdam After Sunset?

Imagine leaving an Amsterdam tavern after sunset in the seventeenth century. There are no glowing shop windows, no illuminated bridges reflected in the canals and no neat rows of streetlights guiding you home. The houses around you disappear into darkness, the streets are uneven and somewhere beside you is a canal.

Exactly where beside you would be useful information.

Today, Amsterdam after dark is almost ridiculously photogenic. Lights trace the bridges, canal houses glow against the water and even a rainy evening manages to look atmospheric. But for centuries, sunset transformed Amsterdam into a very different city.

Once daylight disappeared, much of Amsterdam disappeared with it.

A City You Had to Feel Your Way Through

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was booming. New canal houses were rising, ships crowded the harbour and the city was expanding at extraordinary speed. But all that prosperity didn’t automatically make walking home at night any easier.

Without systematic public lighting, darkness made narrow streets and canals genuinely hazardous. People going outside after dark carried their own lanterns, helping them navigate a city filled with steps, bridges, carts, building materials and open water.

And Amsterdam’s canals didn’t come with the reassuring barriers you might expect today.

Falling into the water wasn’t merely the punchline to a drunken night out. Historical accounts describe people drowning after ending up in canals after dark. A badly lit city built around water was, unsurprisingly, not an ideal combination.

Amsterdam needed a better idea.

Enter a Painter With a Lamp

That idea came from an interesting source.

Jan van der Heyden was a successful seventeenth-century painter, known for extraordinarily detailed cityscapes. But apparently being good at one profession wasn’t enough to keep him occupied. He also turned his attention to practical problems in the city around him.

One of those problems was darkness.

Van der Heyden developed an improved oil street lantern and, more importantly, a complete system for lighting Amsterdam’s streets. Rather than placing a few lamps here and there and hoping for the best, his plan considered where lanterns should stand, how high they should hang and how they should be maintained.

In 1669, Amsterdam approved his plan.

Soon, around 1,800 lanterns were illuminating the city.

For the first time, Amsterdam had something approaching an organised public lighting network.

Someone Still Had to Light Them

Of course, installing hundreds of oil lamps did not mean Amsterdam could simply flick a switch at sunset.

Every single one had to be lit.

Lamp lighters became part of the machinery behind Amsterdam’s nights, responsible for lighting and maintaining the lanterns that Van der Heyden had introduced. Oil had to be supplied, wicks needed attention and the lamps themselves needed cleaning.

And the resulting light would hardly impress us today.

Compared with modern electric lighting, seventeenth-century oil lanterns produced a modest glow. Amsterdam didn’t suddenly blaze like Times Square. Darkness remained part of nighttime life, but now small pools of light appeared along streets and canals, giving pedestrians something to navigate by.

It was a subtle change with enormous consequences.

The city had begun reclaiming the night.

Amsterdam’s Favourite Problem Solver

Street lighting wasn’t Van der Heyden’s only contribution to Amsterdam.

He also worked with his brother Nicolaes on improving firefighting equipment and developed the flexible fire hose. In a densely built city filled with wooden interiors, workshops, warehouses and open flames, fire was another problem Amsterdam took extremely seriously. The Rijksmuseum preserves his detailed images of Amsterdam fires and describes him both as a pioneer of modern street lighting and an inventor associated with the fire hose.

There is something wonderfully appropriate about the combination.

One invention helped Amsterdam see in the dark.

The other helped when somebody’s candle made the dark considerably brighter than intended.

From Oil to Gas to Electricity

Van der Heyden’s lanterns didn’t illuminate Amsterdam forever. Technology moved on.

During the nineteenth century, gas lighting transformed the city again, producing a stronger and more reliable light than the old oil lamps. Later came electricity. Amsterdam’s own historical statistics show just how rapidly public lighting expanded around the turn of the twentieth century: between 1887 and 1925, the number of streetlights in the city tripled.

Gradually, true darkness retreated.

Shops could shine onto the pavement. Streets became easier to navigate. Bridges, squares and busy roads remained visible long after sunset. Nighttime Amsterdam became less something to survive and more something to enjoy.

The City That Glows After Dark

Walk through Amsterdam tonight and it is difficult to imagine the city without light.

The canals reflect illuminated windows, bicycles flash past under streetlamps and bridges create those perfect rows of glowing arches that appear in approximately every second photograph ever taken of Amsterdam.

Yet underneath all that light is a much older city.

A city where darkness once swallowed entire streets. Where pedestrians carried lanterns to find their way home. Where stepping slightly too far to one side could result in an unexpectedly cold ending to the evening.

And where, in 1669, a painter looked at the problem and decided Amsterdam could do better.

The beautiful Amsterdam night we know today didn’t begin with neon signs, glowing shop windows or illuminated canal bridges.

It began with 1,800 little lamps and a man who thought the city should be able to see where it was going.