canal house bingo

One of the more amusing pastimes we enjoyed in Amsterdam was looking at canal houses. In particular, we hunted to find representatives of all the types of gables one can find on the canal houses. Gables are flat fronts on the roofs of canal houses, similar (though not as deceptive) to the false fronts used to make old west buildings look as though they had more than one floor.

Gables originally served to disguise the steepness of the roofs, but in time they began to be decorative. In the logo below, you can see the outlines of (from left to right, regarding the white images on top) a neck gable, a step gable, and a bell gable.

Each gable had its heyday of popularity, so you can roughly date canal houses by the style of their gables. Eben made it his mission to identify all the different types of gables described in our guidebook.

We got our best view of the houses from the canal cruise we took with my friend and co-worker Debbie (in the Netherlands for the same conference I attended) on our first night in Amsterdam.

us on the canal cruise boat

This picture (below) conveys the quality of the typical Amsterdam street. Note that the canal houses are not always at perfectly parallel angles, which gives the whole city a faintly tim-burtonesque character. This is enhanced by the fact that many are deliberately built to lean out over the street just a bit. This was so that furniture and large packages could be hoisted by pulley to the upper floors with less threat of crashing into the lower windows.