“AMSTERDAM, that big city, is built on wooden piles,” sings a Dutch children’s song.
And not just a few piles here and there, but a few million. There are almost 14,000 of them supporting the Dam Square palace alone. Built in the seventeenth century, it was considered a world wonder at the time, but it wouldn’t have survived without those piles underneath. The massively heavy marble floor alone would have cracked to pieces and disappeared into the ground without that foundation, not to mention the rest of the palace, at the time Amsterdam’s city hall.
It went without saying, without debate, that New Amsterdam would be built similarly. Later new construction in Manhattan has given way to steel and concrete piles, but New York’s wooden piles are still everywhere underground. Just like in the former Breukelen, now Brooklyn. There they flatly refuse to get rid of them. Underneath Brooklyn Bridge Park, a park with a couple of residential towers, there are roughly 13,000, almost as many as under Amsterdam’s Dam Square. They have been in the ground for fifty years now and they function just fine. Wood can be kept indefinitely as long as it remains below the water table and does not come into contact with air. Corrective maintenance was required here and there, but the load-bearing capacity is completely intact.
IT IS not surprising that in Brooklyn they are adamant when you realize who is responsible for the construction and layout of that park. It is Michael van Valkenburgh, descendant of Lambert van Valkenburg who came from Limburg to Manhattan around 1640 and bought a piece of land where the Empire State Building now stands. Michael is a celebrated landscape architect. He knows very well what the recipe was and is of the successful architecture in his motherland of origin.
Brooklyn Bridge Park, easily accessible via Schermerhorn Street, Van Brunt Street, Middagh Street and the playground named after Steven van Voorhees from Drenthe, now has two big residential towers. The builders insisted that the wooden piles, mainly made of pine, remain as a foundation. Protest groups demanded replacement. The builders refused to budge, a judge agreed, and the new residents voted en masse with their wallets: all homes were sold and/or rented out in no time. Fully confident of the Amsterdam construction method.
Because let’s call a spade a spade: after 800 years, Amsterdam has still not fallen. Brooklyn won’t anytime soon either.
* Landscape architect Michael van Valkenburgh, the brains behind Brooklyn Bridge Park. A descendant of a Dutch immigrant, he knows all about Holland’s history of building on foundations supported by wooden piles.
