TURN YOUR head, look back and check if you see it correctly. Sure enough, behind you the Colorado mountains rise, in front of you the street sign says, Vondelpark Drive. And there is more, much more: Amstel Drive, Rotterdam Circle, Amsterdam Drive, Dirksland Street, Hans Brinker Lane and Hans Brinker Street, Valkenburg Drive. There is a Leyden Lane, a Delft Drive and a Hoorne Avenue. Tulip Place, Holland Park Boulevard, Tulip Way and an Old Dutch Mill Road run through and around it. This is Colorado Springs. The distance to the real Vondelpark is 5,000 miles.
You can buy bread and pastries at the Boonzaaijer bakery on Fillmore Street, from the Boonzaaijers who came over from Veenendaal a long time ago. They rightly call themselves Dutch Bakery, and their store is located halfway between that Dutch neighborhood and Peterson Air Force Base. The base in turn is surrounded by a semicircle called Vandenberg Avenue. Again, we are in Colorado, not in Amsterdam, Leiden or Dirksland, and the reason is semi tragic.
DENTIST MARK Albers and his cousin Carla, who works as a lawyer, know it from family lore. Football linebacker Jonathan van Diest has also heard it, as has behavioral therapist Christina Sluis. They are all descendants of the trainload of Dutchmen who came to Colorado from New York at the end of the nineteenth century, in 1892. Their journey from Holland had taken three weeks, 28 families, almost 250 souls. Alamosa in Colorado, south of Colorado Springs, was America’s version of Italy, they had been promised, with mild winters, glorious summers, and fine farmland.
Swindled, they were all scammed. They arrived in late November, and night temps were minus thirty. There were no plots of arable land for them, and there was no housing. They were packed inside two drafty wooden buildings, diphtheria and scarlet fever were prevalent, and within a few weeks 11 of their children succumbed. A certain Holland-American Land and Immigration Company in Utrecht had advertised that beauty and wonderland were awaiting them in Colorado. Families had spent their last savings on it, and why not, because after all the Company board was chaired by a professor at Kampen theological college. You trusted a person like that.
BUT THE professor himself had also been deceived by a couple of sweet talkers. America had become some sort of a promised land. Many Dutch people had emigrated earlier in that century, often in large groups at a time. Success stories had wafted over. And Colorado was a brand new state that welcomed immigrants, especially farm families. The swindlers saw an opening they couldn’t miss. But their deception, inevitably, became apparent right away. There was no American Italy, there were no fertile fields, and a Dutch revolt broke out almost immediately. Some immigrants left Colorado, to Kansas, to Nebraska, to Iowa.
Others, however, stayed anyway and built themselves a life from scratch. They were the ancestors of the baker, the dentist, the linebacker and the therapist. Their descendants also include broker VanderPloeg, insurers Van der Meulen and Vander Putten, optometrist Vander Horck, masseuse Van der Vere and doctor Van De Veer. They are still remembered with respect today. Hence the Vondelpark, the Amstel, the tulip and all those other Dutch street names. And the baker. He sells speculaas and banketletters all year round. In Colorado Springs, there’s a market for it.
