The glass roof
Daylight falling onto the tiles and shopfronts.
M.Minderhoud โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Fred Romero from Paris, France โ CC BY 2.0 ยท Fred Romero from Paris, France โ CC BY 2.0 ยท Willem Nabuurs โ CC BY-SA 4.0
The arcade sits in the middle of historic central The Hague, and everything is minutes away: the Binnenhof parliament complex and its lake, the Mauritshuis with the Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Prison Gate museum, and the Nieuwe Kerk where Spinoza is buried. Two hours on foot covers all of it, and it is the best use of a single morning in The Hague.
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De Passage is the oldest covered shopping arcade in the Netherlands, opened in 1885 and still working: two intersecting passages in an inverted T, with brick and stone fronts under an arched glass roof on iron framing. The type was a nineteenth-century European fashion begun by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan and the Paris arcades: a shopping street roofed in glass, lit by day, sheltered from rain โ the direct ancestor of the modern shopping mall, but at the scale of a street rather than a box. In The Hague the arcade was an emblem of a rising middle class that wanted elegant shopping away from the open market. It has been restored several times and gained a third arm in the 1990s. Its shops today are mostly ordinary, but the building rewards passing through: the light falling from the glass roof onto the tiles and shopfronts is the point, and entry is free.
Daylight falling onto the tiles and shopfronts.
Nineteenth-century engineering shown, not hidden.
De Passage, 2511 The Hague