Finance History | Beursplein 5, Amsterdam, 1913 — The Year the Share Trade Stopped Being a Lodger

The securities traders of Amsterdam spent a decade complaining about their new building and then built their own across the square. Berlage's exchange had opened in 1903 with a floor for each branch of trade. The securities floor was too small almost at once, because the volume of share dealing was growing faster than anyone had planned for. There were other grievances. The heating was poor, the ventilation worse, and the facades were cracking as the building settled onto its piles. The Vereniging voor de Effectenhandel, the securities dealers' association, asked the city for somewhere better and was turned down. So it worked out whether it could finance a building itself, found that it could, and did. Beursplein 5 opened in 1913, directly across the square from the exchange the traders had just walked out of. Some accounts date the move 1912. That is the pattern this whole collection has been tracing, arriving at its logical end. For three centuries the share trade had been a guest: a corner of a commodity exchange in 1611, one floor among several in 1903, a crowd on a bridge before either. Here it stopped being a guest. The securities market had become large enough and rich enough to commission its own premises, on its own terms, paid for out of its own turnover. Everything since has followed from that. The building still houses Euronext Amsterdam, which means this square has held the city's share trading continuously for over a century, longer than any of the four exchange buildings that came before it managed. A bronze Charging Bull by Arturo Di Modica was placed outside in 2012, a copy of the one he installed near the New York Stock Exchange in 1989. There is no bear. The two buildings facing each other across Beursplein are the whole argument in one view. Berlage's red brick on one side, built by an architect who thought the stock trade was a passing phase, and on the other the house the stock trade built for itself and has not left. For the full lineage: the Nieuwe Brug and St Olaf's Chapel before 1611, Hendrick de Keyser's exchange over the Rokin from 1611, Zocher's from 1845 where De Bijenkorf now stands, Berlage's from 1903, and this from 1913. Cover photo: APK, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, the Beursplein frontage seen across the square from the Berlage side. Coordinates 52.374390, 4.895967, resolved by Nominatim for Beursplein 5 and agreeing with Commons geotags on the square to within about 30 m.