Albert Cuypmarkt

The market occupies a broad street in a residential neighborhood where small traders once had no permanent place of their own. They came here with wooden carts, laid out their goods beside the houses, and, at the police's demand, had to keep moving on. Later, the city assigned them this section of Albert Cuypstraat, and trading became a daytime routine for almost the whole week. In the morning, stalls fill the street, and after closing, it returns to ordinary city life.

At the corner of Eerste Sweelinckstraat stands a bronze singer with a microphone: André Hazes, one of the best-known performers of Dutch urban song. The site for the monument was chosen as the exact address of the first opportunity Hazes received as a child.

The market's name appeared much earlier. New streets in the neighborhood were named after Dutch artists; this one was dedicated to Albert Cuyp, a seventeenth-century landscape painter from Dordrecht. The market inherited the street's name.

Hawkers brought trade here. By around nineteen hundred, about fifty thousand people already lived in this rapidly built-up neighborhood. Sellers with wooden carts gathered on the broad Albert Cuypstraat: there were plenty of customers here, and room for their goods. Hawkers were allowed to stop only while making a sale, so police officers constantly made them move on. On July seventh, nineteen oh five, the city assigned them a permanent section of the street. Seven years later, trading was permitted during the day six days a week. That established an arrangement that still remains today: in the morning, sellers occupy the street, and after closing, they clear away their stalls.

On Liberation Day in nineteen fifty-nine, André Hazes was singing beside one of those stalls. He had not yet turned eight. André's father washed windows and supported a large family, while the boy himself already knew how to earn money among the shoppers by singing. Later, the scene was retold this way: he needed the coins for a gift for his mother, whose birthday fell the next day.

Among the passersby was Johnny Kraaijkamp, a popular comedian with his own television program. He heard the boy and offered to bring him to the studio. That same year, Hazes sang “Piove” on the air, then recorded two records—“Droomschip” and “Juanita.”

He did not become a child star. The records did not bring success, his later performances were limited because of his age, and after school Hazes earned his living as a chimney sweep, a market seller, and a bartender. He continued singing behind the bar. In nineteen seventy-six, the singer Willy Alberti helped him record “Eenzame Kerst”; this record became Hazes's first hit and finally gave him the profession Johnny Kraaijkamp had steered him toward at the market seventeen years earlier.

The fruit box and the stall beside which the boy sang have not survived. On September twenty-third, two thousand five, exactly one year after Hazes's death, his widow, children, and the elderly Johnny Kraaijkamp unveiled the bronze statue at the corner of the market. Kraaijkamp first brought André from here before audiences, and forty-six years later he took part in his return to the same street.