Een Biertje at the Squat Bar

A story I came across while going through my archives, thinking of something to post as "public" on Urbis. It's from my time in Amsterdam, one of a handful of one-off articletjes (that's some fancy Dunglish right there) I played around with. Amsterdam has a fairly robust squat scene, which if nothing else are fairly cheap places to grab a drink or some good food, and at the best of times are a real cultural alternative in a city that is less culturally vibrant than you would expect (that, though, is the stuff for another posting altogether). It's also a city in the midst of a real estate boom (who isn't?), which is leading to a renewed war on the squats and the squatters who inhabit them, an issue that is far too complex to go into on this humble little blog. So, then, just a story, about hanging out at one of them.

For those of you who aren't too up on Amsterdam geography, "the Pijp" is a formerly working class neighborhood turned... honestly, I still think it's fairly working class (Dutch working class), but some of the more grungy kids view it as a yuppy enclave. As is that somehow doesn't describe the whole city.


"Een Biertje at the Squat Bar"


Daniel knows this girl who works at a squat, and they’re having bar night tonight, and maybe I’d like to go along. Well, no, he doesn’t actually know her, but they have friends in common, sort of.

“She writes for this activist newspaper in Finland,” – Daniel’s accent has that husky Finnish twang, like he’s talking into the wind with a mouth full of fish – “and she’s on the Finnish IRC channel, which like everyone who’s cool in the country is on, and so when I told my friends that I was moving here, they said that I should get in touch with her, and since we both have our photos on the same website, she said to give her a call when I got into town.”

Daniel’s just arrived from Finland himself, and we’re hanging out in the Center, waiting to find out where the squat is. When we get the address – along with the warning that it’s a rather low key night – I suggest that we bike over, but Daniel doesn’t have a bike yet, and he refuses to hop on the back of mine – “no, really,” I explain, “everyone rides on the back, it’s what you have to do if you want to be Dutch” – begging off with some lame excuse about not being sure how to do it. So we walk the half hour from the Medieval district through the Golden Age into the Industrial Revolution, getting lost and praying that the rain will hold off until we make it inside. Between the two of us we don’t have a map, and even though I lived here all last winter, I can never remember the street names, so we navigate using the transit maps at the tram stops.

“Here is it,” I say, as we arrive at a boarded up and graffitied over storefront in the Old West, near the requisite Albert Heijn. I point out to Daniel the telltale signs of the squat: the little lightning logo; the yellow banner; the ubiquitous Rita fliers. “That’s about Rita Verdonk, the Immigration Minister. We don’t like her.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe because she embodies the socially regressive characteristics of an outdated colonial system. Or maybe because she’s arrogant and racist. Or maybe all three. It depends on who you ask.”

The entryway is dark and smells of urine, and a metal gate is pulled partially over the door. It’s hard to tell if anything is happening inside, but still we knock.

A Danish kid opens the door for us, with wraparound sunglasses and a lip piercing and Scandinavian punk rock blaring from behind him. He invites us inside, where three or four more people are sitting around an old bar, smoking roll ups and drinking fifty-cent beer. The lighting is dim, giving the whole room a sense of being gray and faded, as if a bunch of gutter punks had taken over a longshoremen’s watering hole. The bartender – Daniel’s Finnish connection – has a crown of tightly interwoven dreadlocks, while the other kids here are less glam rock and more thrift shop functional. The graffiti on the way to the bathroom reads “Everybody hate the Pijp.”

“Well, yeah, I can usually get to Sweden in about two days,” goes the conversation around the bar.

“Two days?! It always takes me at least three.”

“Well, you can get from here to Copenhagen in about eighteen hours, and then it’s pretty easy to get to Stockholm. I should be able to get to Copenhagen faster, but I always get stuck in Hamburg, and it’s always raining in fucking Hamburg.”

“But Hamburg’s a nice city.”

“But I’m never in the city, I’m always at a fucking gas station on the motorway, ten kilometers from the city.”

“I just think it’s impossible to get out of this city. No one will stop for you.”

“Well, where are you waiting? If you go to the official hitchhiking point and – ”

“There’s an official hitchhiking point?”

“Oh yeah, it’s at the Amstel station, there’s like a big sign with a thumb and people know to pick you up.”

The music goes through various incarnations as Daniel and I drink and chat with the other people here. This bar is emblematic of the city, young and international, a mixture of languages floating around the room, the hint of rain outside. Reggae and hip-hop and old jazz float around the smoky air, and for all of its institutional barrenness, this place actually does feel strangely cozy.

I ask the bartender, “so this place used to be a real bar?”

“Yeah, it used to be a coffeeshop. And they want to make it one again, if they can get the paperwork together. But I’m not sure if they’ll be able to – the person who wants to take it over is related to the old owner, and the Stadsdeel doesn’t like him, he was involved with all kinds of guns and violence.”

“And so what happens if this guy gets permission to make this place into a bar again?”

“Then we get kicked out. Or maybe we’ll get kicked out before, in the next eviction wave. We’re the last place like this near the Center, they want the space.”

I point to the back room, where large metal poles have been jimmied against the door, an impromptu barricade: “Is that to keep the cops out?”

“Yep. When you squat a place, you have to secure all the entrances, so that no one can break in. That’s why the windows are covered up. We used to squat this whole building, but they managed to break into the second floor.”

Such are the perils of the squatting life. Ostensibly serving a variety of social and political goods, more and more squatters are being viewed as parasites by people on both ends.

“Yeah, squatting is supposed to be about housing rights, keeping housing affordable, creating available spaces. And what a lot of people don’t realize is the work that goes into it – get your paperwork together, secure the space, go through the court process once someone decides that they want to buy the building you’re in – it isn’t just free rent. And of course it’s getting harder to find space, with everyone anti-squatting.”

I ask her if she considers the antikraaks to be the enemy, somehow, and she sort of grimaces, acknowledging the sensitive nature of the question.

“Yeah, I do. Most of the people who are doing anti-squat are students, and they do it because it’s easy, but I wish that they would squat, so that they could be making a real statement about the lack of affordable housing. And also, when you anti-squat, you don’t have any rights; at least when you squat, if you do it right, you have some protection.”

I look back at the barricades against the door and wonder just what sort of protection the squatters really have. Right now, she’s living in a building that she and her friends have essentially renovated, on their own volition, using their own funds, and now that they’ve finally finished, they’re all convinced that they’re going to get kicked out in another month or two. It’s hard to see that as being security.

Daniel, meanwhile, has hit it off with the Danish kid, who’s invited him to hop on the back of another bicycle and check out the kid’s squat, see if he wants to move in. Once again, he begs off – “No, hey man, it’s cool, that’s what everyone does here” – citing his fear of riding on the back of the bicycle.

“Well then come by tomorrow. I think you’ll like it, it’s not that far from the Center if you take the Haarlemerdijk.”
Even for squatters, proximity to the Center is important.

It’s time for me to head out, as the music changes and Daniel makes an appointment to see the Nordic squat. Something from the early Eighties fills the room, impossibly peppy and infectious for this gutter punk hangout, bouncing off the graffiti and the barricades and the angry fliers and the bottles of beer and the cups of tea and the pouches of tobacco and the languages and the laughter and the fear that everyone has of being tossed out of their homes in their tiny little holes on the fringes of society in the middle of the city. The Danish kid lets me out, locking the door behind me, and I zip up my coat, unchain my bike, and ride off in the rain.


Creative Commons, 2007, Etc. Etc.