Criminal, Cosmopolitan, Commodified: How Rotterdam’s Interwar Amusement Street, the Schiedamsedijk, Became a Safe Mirror Image of Itself

This chapter develops a layered analysis of the Schiedamsedijk, Rotterdam’s interwar amusement street. It links the street’s split socio-cultural character to that of port cities in general, and investigates this along the lines of a similar divide in perceptions of safety and security. Based on an historical bird’s-eye view of the pleasure area, the Schiedamsedijk’s criminal and cosmopolitan sides are discussed. Both of these maritime urban traits were neutralised when the Schiedamsedijk reinvented itself as a domestic tourist attraction in the late 1930s. Through visual sources, interchanges are foregrounded between contrasting internal and external perspectives on safety, which ultimately help to nuance and reframe the stereotypical characters and ambiguous nature traditionally ascribed to this historical environment of pleasure culture.