When painting a picture of the retail landscape of Amsterdam in the age of the great city expansions, we should not limit ourselves to dispersal maps and street patterns. We also want to know what Amsterdam's streets and shops looked like in the seventeenth century. In this chapter, we shall therefore focus on paving, street lighting and the hustle and bustle of the street, and particularly on residential and commercial housing in Amsterdam, and the ways in which the exterior and interior were made suitable for retail sales. And, although the available source material is scarce and incomplete, we shall also attempt to find out what the daily interchanges between shopkeepers and consumers were like in practice.

The street

Let us begin by observing that the streets were crowded—very crowded. Although the builtup area of the city had expanded significantly in the seventeenth century, it had not become less busy, particularly in the old centre where the main shopping streets were located. The old centre was home to Amsterdam's central square, the important public buildings, the inner harbour where inland vessels from every corner of the Republic were moored, and there were also markets and shops; in short, this was where much of urban life took place. Precisely because of this clustering of functions, the centre would have been even more crowded than in the sixteenth century, when the population size and activity would have encroached less upon the available space. What is more, a growing number of wealthy citizens preferred to travel through the city by horse and carriage.