by Marcel Beijer
IN THE late 1990s, there was a businessman who wanted to turn Almere Poort into a Wild West district. Complete with wooden houses, a riding school, saloons and sandy roads.
Almerica, he called it.
It was kitschy, and it was airy-fairy, but this Marc Gregoire was America-crazy and he dared to dream big. Moreover, the man was an experienced entrepreneur. He ran a thriving equestrian center in Amsterdam and saw opportunities for expansion in the new land that the Dutch had only decades earlier reclaimed from the water. I believe that the city council actually did consider this at the time, but I don’t remember that for sure.
I interviewed him at his Amsterdam equestrian place and discovered why Gregoire was so fond of the polder mentality. “Almere is the most American city in the Netherlands,” he said. “There are pioneers there, frontier people, who come from everywhere and build a city and community together.”
HE ALSO saw Almereans as fortune seekers. I made grateful use of that aspect in my novel Golden Mountains (Dutch title: Gouden Bergen) where I draw a parallel between the booming Almere of the 1990s and the Goldrush in the western USA.
Where are you from?
The first question Almereans often used to ask each other in the early years was, “Where are you from?”, just like Americans do. In Almere, the answer is usually “Amsterdam,” or “Gooi.” Americans still like to point out their own origins: an Irish ancestry, or Italy, Central America and, of course, the Netherlands.
JUST LIKE in America, new Dutch trends are regularly emerging in Almere first. In a positive sense: rappers, break dancing, free Internet, affordable build-your-own-home plots. But also in a negative sense, such as the decline of newspaper reading. One could observe this in the newly built city by the end of the previous century: hardly anyone subscribed to a paper anymore. Hard rightwing political parties were the first to gain a foothold in the young town of Almere. Later, the rest of the country followed.
And just as America is the land of “unlimited possibilities,” that notion also lived for years in Almere. Wild plans came along, like Mr Gregoire’s Almerica. Most of those fell through, only to be followed in no time by the next outlandish idea. Cycling journalist Thijs Zonneveld wanted to build a mile-high mountain in Almere, there were plans for a pyramid, the new Thialf ice arena should be built in Almere. And some plans succeeded, like high-profile neighborhoods, or the separate traffic flows. Or they were realized and then still failed. For example, an unfinished “medieval” castle has been staring the city in the face for more than two decades already, and the Floriade world horticultural exhibition, which was brought in with much fanfare, turned into a big flop.
Quite a shame, though, that this plan for Almerica was never realized. It would have been a more sensational conversation piece than the neighborhoods that can now be seen in Almere Poort.
But then again, I too am a diehard America fan, of course.
* Marcel Beijer is a journalist in Almere and winner of the Dutch News Magazine Journalism Prize 2023.
* The never finished Castle in Almere.
