Rooms and doors of Plantage
The Plantage is quiet in a way that surprises visitors who walked here from Waterlooplein. Once the museums and the zoo close, the avenues empty, the trams along Plantage Middenlaan carry mostly residents, and the side streets under the plane trees are almost silent. Accommodation is small and well kept: a few boutique hotels in nineteenth-century townhouses, serviced apartments in converted buildings, and many private flats with the high rooms of the period. The Entrepotdok warehouses are a world of their own, with thick walls, heavy beams and windows looking onto a dock lined with houseboats, and noise barely carries between them. Nothing about the quarter invites attention after dark. A visitor walking up an avenue at eleven looks like someone returning from dinner in the old centre, which is what most people on these pavements at that hour are doing. On warm evenings the benches of the Wertheimpark stay occupied until late and a few terraces at the edges of the quarter keep their tables out, yet by eleven the avenues have returned to their usual hush, and the loudest sound on Plantage Middenlaan is a late tram rolling toward the centre.











