Korenlei

Today, Korenlei is occupied by terraces, hotels, and sightseeing-boat moorings. At house number seven, a Baroque façade survives, with anchors, lions' heads, dolphins, and a gilded ship at the top. It was commissioned by carriers who were long permitted only the least profitable part of river trade.

They were called unfree skippers. They were not serfs. They were boatmen excluded from the closed corporation of free skippers, which admitted chiefly descendants of its members. The unfree skippers earned their living on small flat-bottomed vessels: each year, they bought permission to travel on the Lieve Canal, carried goods between Damme and Ghent, and on the Lys and Scheldt mainly took jobs that the free skippers had refused. By the sixteenth century, there were several hundred such carriers, but they had no premises of their own.

They held their meetings in a tavern. There they arranged orders, permits, and shared expenses; they also had to store their papers there. As early as seventeen thirty-two, the carriers commissioned a design for their own façade, but they were able to buy a suitable house only after seven years of negotiations.

On June second, seventeen thirty-nine, they voted to buy the Korenlei tavern called The Fawn. One person opposed it: the owner of the previous tavern where their meetings had been held. He understood that, along with the carriers, he would lose regular customers and the income from their meetings. The others voted to move.

Several months later, the city aldermen allowed the new owners to remodel the façade and place a ship-shaped weather vane on top. The architect Bernard de Wilde transformed the former tavern into a ceremonial guildhall; it was later called the Guildhall of the Unfree Skippers. Here, opposite the guildhall of their privileged rivals on the other bank, the unfree skippers received a hall and a place for their archive.

Their own guildhall did not give them equal shipping rights. In seventeen sixty, the unfree skippers proposed merging the two groups, but the free skippers refused. Their monopoly disappeared only by the end of the eighteenth century.

Above Korenlei remains the ship that the city allowed them to place after that vote. Across the Lys, another ship answers it—the one carved above the door of the Guildhall of the Free Skippers.