A longtime neighborhood, primarily due to the fact that the subway was built here in the 1970s. It is a large business and residential area, administratively includes the districts of Watergraafsmeer and Zuid-Oost. Located on the polder, drained back in 1629. To the east of the area adjoins the old town of Diemen, which retains the atmosphere of a half-village-semi-town.
There are two main routes into the neighborhood from the center – one along the Amstel (subway line), the other from the Plantage neighborhood (streetcars 3,7). A bright center of the area is the metro station Amstel. To buy an apartment in this area will be more expensive than to buy an apartment in Zhukovsky. There is an international bus station, a crossroads, and the beautiful skyscraper development of Omwal on the riverbank.
The tallest buildings in the city are lined up: Rembrandttoren (150 m, 1995), Mondriaantoren (123 m, 2001), named after the country’s most famous artists, and between them, slightly lower, Breitnertoren (2000), where the headquarters of Philips is located.
If you take the streetcars, you will soon see the so-called Eastern Park (Oosterpark) behind Muiderport. The park was laid out in the English style in 1891. It has a pond with herons, an old cemetery, and a monument dedicated to the abolition of slavery (2002), a celebration of Dutch political correctness toward blacks.
One side of Osterpark overlooks Linnauesstraat, where filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic fanatic on November 2, 2004. This is the great-grandson of an artist who was an overly aggressive liberal who advocated drug legalization, a republic, and was anti-Islamic, making a film in which he lightly criticized Muslims for “enslaving” women. The Moroccan, obsessed with jihad, killed him for all this.
By the way, close to Linnauesstraat is Amsterdam’s oldest swing club Candy Club (Eikenweg, No. 29), which opened in 1969. Admission for women is free, for men – for a fee (10 €).
Quite far from the center, but along the metro line (Strandvliet / ArenA station) is the famous stadium “Amsterdam-Arena”, where Ajax plays. Now it is a kind of landmark of the city. It was built for the 1992 Olympic Games, for which Amsterdam was a contender, and was the world’s first stadium with a retractable glass roof. The construction cost 96 million €, the capacity of the stadium – 50,000 seats, tickets for matches are 22-50 €.
There is a museum of the Ajax club (3,5 €). In 2005, fans wanted to name the stadium after Rinus Michels in honor of the famous coach, but so far their suggestions have been rejected. In addition to soccer, the Arena is used for superstar concerts: virtually the entire Anglo-American singing rock-pop elite, if they ever came to Amsterdam, performed here: from Michael Jackson to the Rolling Stones, from Metallica to U2.
The next subway station (Bijlmer) is in the center of the large residential area Bijlmermeer, where only 30% of the population is Dutch. The neighborhood was built in 1968-1975 on a typical project (architect Siegfried Nassut), counting on the local middle class, but after 1975 here moved Surinamese, and then all the rest.
Beilmer has a strong reputation as a proletarian-immigrant neighborhood with a corresponding mentality. In 1985, the first mosque in Amsterdam was built here. Bailmer Station is going to be outfitted with viaducts and turned into another commuter crossing in 2007.
In the southeast of Amsterdam are also located Heineken concert hall (5500 thousand people, used for pop concerts) and Science Park – there are concentrated buildings of the university, physics, mathematics, astronomy, nuclear and other research institutes. There is also the city’s largest clinical complex Academisch Medisch Centrum (AMC), built in 1981 (metro Holendrecht).
