Look for a row of tall brick town houses with pale stone trim, high rectangular windows, and richly decorated facades - these are the famous Brussels Houses that help give the Spijkerkwartier its grand face.
Here, at the end of our walk, Arnhem offers one of its most tender tricks... it keeps faith with things that no longer stand.
The name Spijkerkwartier reaches back to two medieval spijkers, meaning storehouses or granaries. The word itself comes from the Latin spica, a word tied to stored grain. Those buildings vanished long ago, but the neighborhood still carries them in its name, as if the city refused to let them slip away. One, the Geldersch Spijker, stood roughly where Parkstraat meets Prins Hendrikstraat. The other, the Hertogs Spijker, later called the Dullertspijker, stood near Karel van Gelderstraat and Dullertstraat until workers demolished it in the eighteen eighties.
This district could only appear once Arnhem stopped being a tightly held fortified town and began to stretch outward. In eighteen fifty-three, city architect Hendrik Jan Heuvelink drew the plan. But the neighborhood truly took shape later, in the eighteen eighties, under the direction of his son, Hendrik Jan Heuvelink junior. Wealthy residents wanted to live close to the center, but not inside its old crush, so private builders raised broad, stately houses here - often four stories if you count the basement level - with neoclassical balance and touches of French neo-Renaissance, meaning a style that borrowed the ornament and elegance of sixteenth-century France.
One of the people who keeps this place human is Hermina Coops. She owned the estate around the old Geldersch Spijker. Between eighteen sixty-five and eighteen seventy-two, she made an agreement with the city, and Parkstraat cut across part of her land. In eighteen seventy-eight, she sold the whole estate to Arnhem. The old country house came down. Parkstraat stretched farther east. Prins Hendrikstraat crossed through. Then Hermina did something quietly moving: she moved into a new corner house at Parkstraat forty-seven and named it Villa Gelders Spijker. She gave a lost estate a second life in language. Even now, two stone gateposts at Kastanjelaan thirty-one A still mark the old entrance like punctuation left behind from an erased sentence.
If you are looking at these Brussels Houses, you are also seeing the ambition of architect Jan Hendrik van Sluijters. In eighteen seventy-seven, after learning from townhouse architecture in Brussels and Paris, he created this celebrated row on Spijkerstraat. He advertised the houses himself, trying to fill them, because speculative building meant real risk. Grandeur here was never abstract; it depended on people gambling on Arnhem’s future.
Later, the quarter fell hard. In the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, many houses were split into rented floors and rooms, and the area became known as Arnhem’s red-light district. After years of legal struggle, window prostitution ended here on the fourth of January, two thousand six. Since then, restoration has returned dignity to many facades, and in two thousand seven the district gained protection as a nationally recognized historic cityscape.
And that may be the loveliest final image for Arnhem: not a city that freezes the past, but a city that lets vanished things stay readable... in names, in street lines, in reused houses, in memory carried forward by stone.
