Cuypers' facade
Deliberately like the Rijksmuseum by the same architect.
Diego Delso โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท S Sepp โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Txllxt TxllxT โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Paul Arps โ CC BY 2.0
Ferry lines leaving from directly behind the station and crossing the IJ to Amsterdam Noord, **entirely free** for pedestrians and cycles with no ticket and no limit on trips. The two main destinations: Buiksloterweg, from which the Eye film museum and the lookout tower are a short walk, and NDSM โ a former shipyard turned art and street district with a street art museum in it. The crossing itself takes five minutes and gives the best view of the city from the water, for nothing.
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Amsterdam Centraal is the first thing most visitors see, and a building worth looking at rather than merely passing through: a red brick Gothic Revival front with towers and clocks, completed by the architect Pierre Cuypers in 1889 โ the same architect as the Rijksmuseum, and the resemblance between the two is deliberate. Building it was an enormous engineering undertaking: it stands on three artificial islands in the water of the IJ, resting on some 8,630 wooden piles driven into the mud โ the same technique the whole of Amsterdam is built on, but at industrial scale. The decision was controversial then and remains so: putting the station here cut the city off from the waterfront it had grown up on, turning a historic harbour into a railway line. That severance is now being undone gradually with walkways and free ferries across to the northern bank. The right-hand dial on the facade is not a clock but a wind direction indicator.
Deliberately like the Rijksmuseum by the same architect.
Crossing from behind the station to Amsterdam Noord.
Stationsplein, 1012 Amsterdam